Unfinished
by eyrianone
Summary: It should have brought them closer together, not torn them apart – she understands this now. What she doesn't know is whether any way back for them still remains. Future fic.
1. Chapter 1

**Title: ****Unfinished**

**Author:** eyrianone

**Rating:** T

**Spoilers:** Future fic – spoilers thru season five.

**Summary:** It should have brought them even closer together, not torn them apart – she understands this now. What she doesn't know is whether any way back for them still remains.

**Disclaimer:** (From ViaLethe) – 'Words are mine. World ain't.'

**A/N: I'll keep it brief. This idea has been in my head a while now and finally I thought to hell with it I'm going to write it. This story will be angsty, it will involve heart-ache, and it might be tough to read. But it will also be about destiny, forgiveness, and the scope of Castle & Beckett's love. A happy ending is guaranteed.**

* * *

**Prologue:**

* * *

_June, 2016._

* * *

It's too wet for June. Cold and grey the sky is oppressive over the city of New York as Detective Kate Beckett dashes down a sopping, slippery sidewalk. The heel of her boot catches on the rim of an office building doorway as she enters it, and it sends her stumbling into the polished marble foyer.

She takes a moment to ensure her feet are beneath her solidly again before she heads routinely to the in-building Starbucks, and the dark black roast that's currently calling her name.

Loudly.

Unfortunately, there's a stockbroker in the line up in front of her, delaying everyone while he tries to get the app on his phone to update the DOW index, and when he's already been asked three times for his order and he raps out her old one, Kate's eyes close on an automatic wave of pain.

_It's silly - it's just coffee._

But she hasn't had a latte in the better part of a year now, just hasn't been able to face it. And like everything else that she's avoided it's time to stop that, step forward once more. And Kate's finally reached a point where steps forward again are possible for her to make.

_You have to start somewhere._

So she takes a deep breath and tries it out, tries that first baby step. Her palms begin sweating and goose bumps break out across her pale skin as the words slip past her lips with more than a little trepidation.

"Skinny, two-pumps sugar-free vanilla latte, please."

The cop swallows hard.

_Step accomplished._

"Sure thing, hon. Anything else I can get you?" The cheerful barista cocks an eyebrow at her expectantly.

Kate shakes her head, pays in a bit of a daze and waits for she knows not what exactly, moving to the pick-up end of the counter with a thousand butterflies in her stomach and a nervous, shaking heart. It's not like this should be a big deal, its coffee – it's just coffee.

And yet, when her order arrives and the first sip bursts its sweet familiar flavor over her tongue and she finds herself managing a small smile – it feels like a milestone victory to Beckett.

The tiny tremulous smile is still adorning her face ten minutes later when she takes her customary seat in Dr. Burke's expansive office.

It doesn't go unnoticed either.

"You look better, Kate."

The tall, distinguished, African American psychiatrist folds himself elegantly into his usual chair opposite her, dark eyes smiling even though his face remains impassive.

Her grip tightening on her coffee cup, Kate meets his eyes with a small nod.

"Thank you," she says softly, raising the coffee cup up in a mini-salute. "Latte," she adds shyly.

Dr. Burke looks surprised at first, he knows all about her resolute avoidance of it, and then the corners of the shrinks' mouth turn up and he nods his approval at her.

"Congratulations."

"First step," she says, and Dr. Burke nods again.

"Coffee is significant to you," he acknowledges. He's heard about the ritual more than once in the last year, and at the sight of Kate voluntarily allowing herself to have something of that ritual back – well it's progress. And progress for Kate the last year has been very tough to make.

It makes him wonder what else he can ask her to tackle, wonders whether he can risk bringing up the 'name'. It hovers on the tip of his tongue for long moments, moments when he tries to decide, tries to get a read on how far she'll let him push her here.

"You can say it." His beautiful patient decides for him, and he's pleased to note that her eyes are clear.

"Castle," he says quietly, experimentally.

Something flashes in her eyes, but for once it's not despair, not darkness, not loss, he notices. For the first time in a year, _hope_ has entered her face. Love is what's flashing in her eyes, he thinks, and though the suddenness of it startles the doctor a little, frankly it's about damned time.

And Beckett is nodding at him.

"Castle," she repeats, so softly it's nothing but the merest whisper, but she says it. The word might be quiet but it's there.

"Have you seen him, Kate?"

The cop shakes her head, her long hair falling across her face and she tucks it back behind her right ear, her gaze dropping down onto the carpet.

"No."

"But you're ready to?" he asks.

Beckett shakes her head at first, but the shrug in her shoulders tells him she's not sure.

"What?"

"I don't think he'll want to see me," she says. "And I don't blame him."

"Grief is a strange emotion, Kate. What the two of you went through . . ." Dr. Burke stops for a moment, waits until Kate chances a look at him before he continues. "In an ideal world no-one ever goes through that. It's not a loss anyone should ever have to live with, but of course this isn't an ideal world. Nor is it ideal that you couldn't seem to deal with it together Kate, but you aren't the first couple to break up over something like this."

Kate shrugs, she's heard this before.

"It's my fault," she says, the words laced heavily with regret. "He needed me, and I failed him."

Dr. Burke frowns, "We both know it wasn't that simple," he says.

"No," she agrees. "But I'm the one who closed him out. I'm the one who couldn't see past her own grief for long enough to know he was right there with me. It was the worst thing that has ever happened to either of us – the worst thing that could ever have happened, and he needed 'us' to get him through it."

The shrink nods.

"But I couldn't give him that support," she continues. "Just like my Dad was lost to me when Mom died, I was lost to Castle. He tried, he tried so hard – and I continuously pushed him away."

"Kate-"

"It's true. You know it is. You've agreed with me it is. I let myself drown in my loss, and it was never mine alone."

Dr. Burke sighs softly, but says nothing in the moment. Dark, wise eyes hold hers and wait for her to go on. She's voiced all of this to him before – more than once, but something in her voice, in her demeanor today tells him she's taking charge again. That she's made progress enough to fight for a change.

Beckett continues.

"I gave him no choice but to leave me," she says matter-of-factly. "For the sake of his own sanity he had no other choice left but to walk away. He had others he had to consider."

"That didn't make the loss easier on him, Kate."

The cop nods, "I know that - now. Though we both know I didn't at the time. And I may never forgive myself for holding that against him – how could I?"

"You were lashing out-"Dr. Burke begins, but Kate interrupts him.

"I held the fact he still had Alexis against him, more than once. As if that made _any_ difference at all to the pain he was in. And I will always hate myself for that, for throwing it at him like a weapon."

Tears have crept into Beckett's hazel eyes, shimmering hard there, until she deliberately blinks them back and just holds the emotion behind them in her gaze. It's powerful. Unyielding in a way he's not seen before, there's an ownership to all that has occurred that she's not demonstrated to him until now.

Too much ownership he thinks – under the circumstances.

"Grief, Kate. Grief isn't rational," Dr. Burke replies. "Therefore the choices you made, the things that you allowed to happen under its influence; you can't apply a logical filter over that," he pauses to make sure she's hearing him, before he continues. "Your grief, it's not a crime that you committed."

The cop pushes to her feet and paces the short distance to the office window. Staring out into misty grey her shoulders slump for a moment, then she straightens them with determination, before she spins back around.

"Neither is it an excuse," she throws back at her shrink adamantly. "And I can't let it be an excuse any longer either. I can't let it take away the rest of my life, and it has, it will, it's going to steal all that's left unless I stop it. Maybe it already has."

Dr. Burke narrows his dark eyes, his gut feeling that something has changed since he saw his patient last week getting stronger moment by moment. The psychiatrist thinks back eight months and how Kate was when he first started seeing her again. Dragged into his office against her will by her friends, it was only their prior relationship and all they'd previously accomplished that persuaded the devastated cop to stay that day. In all the time since then, she's gradually clawed her way back. Some weeks have shown more progress than others, but she hasn't leapt forward like this before. She hasn't walked in and opened up, and been so crystal clear. It's very interesting.

"Has what," he says neutrally.

"Castle's filed for divorce," she says quietly, carefully. Very carefully in fact, he can tell speaking those words is killing her. The news doesn't completely surprise him – yet it does. On the one hand it's been almost a year since it happened, and eight months since Kate first re-appeared here. Her husband has been patient, has reached out (by Kate's own account) many, many times, trying to re-connect.

"What grounds did he cite?" he asks her gently.

Beckett bites her lip.

"Irretrievable breakdown."

Dr. Burke nods.

"He was being kind," she says brokenly. "We both know he could have used 'abandonment', he only had to wait another month after all."

The shrink nods again. "From all I know of him he wouldn't do that," he says. "He wouldn't choose to make it your fault so publicly."

Kate stares at the floor.

"No," she agrees. "No, he wouldn't. Rick has too big a heart for that."

Silence stretches between them.

"You don't want this do you, Kate?" her doctor asks at length. "You don't want this chapter of your life behind you. You don't want this to be the end."

The detectives' beautiful eyes rise to his immediately.

"No," she says firmly. Resolutely. "We've already lost our son, our precious baby boy. Getting those papers, it made it real; made it clear – finally – what else I stand to lose. And I don't know how, I don't know if it's even possible any more. But I can't let the fact that we lost Jack mean that we lose each other too."


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two: **Dark skies tell no lies.

* * *

His legs are numb from crouching and the feeling is completely gone from his toes. When his back cracks as he finally straightens himself out to his full height, Castle bows his head – God, he feels old.

Raising his right fingertips to his lips he kisses them and then deposits that kiss gently against the cold headstone, fingers trailing over the roughened edges aimlessly. Eyes blurring as usual as the writer digs extraordinarily deep for a small smile, he can never bear to leave this marker of his son's small life without a grin for Jack. Jack just loved to smile and that's the thing about him that Castle holds onto now the most, the memory of those precious gummy, delighted smiles – and the pure joy they gave him.

_I miss you, little one. I miss you so much._

The words echo around the empty spaces in his heart but stay trapped inside him, "Bye kiddo," is all he whispers into the early morning light, before he adds, "I'll be back soon." Because he will, he knows he will. For some reason although it always breaks his heart to come here, it brings him a weird sort of peace as well. And for Jack, it's the only parental duty left that he can fulfill.

The writer turns from the headstone with as heavy heart as he's ever had. He doesn't know why he felt the need to come here and confess to Jackson that he's filed for divorce from his mother, but he did. He confesses all his failures here now, makes all his apologies – and almost a year after Jackson Castle's death it's also the only place Rick can still manage to cry.

Away from the quiet sanctuary of line after line of memorial stones, lives lost, lives celebrated – emotionally Richard Castle's become something of a ghost. A shadow of a man who's 'larger-than-life' personality and charm once defined him as much as his chosen career did.

But that was before.

Before his baby died and his beloved wife vanished before his eyes, replaced by some 'emotional-fortress' dwelling stranger with blank eyes who couldn't seem to stand to be near him. His misses Kate every bit as much as the beautiful blue-eyed child she bore him, and he'll never get over the loss of either of them – not truly, but for his daughter and his mother he tells himself everyday that he _will_ go on. That he has too.

Storm clouds are gathering as Castle heads for his car, but he doesn't even notice.

* * *

Back at the loft he mechanically removes his jacket and scarf, hanging them neatly into the closet before he pads with his head down into the kitchen on auto-pilot, startling enormously when he looks up enough to notice Alexis is waiting for him there.

"Jeez – honey, give a guy some warning," he says, determinedly twisting the corners of his mouth up into his best approximation of a smile as he wonders why she's here.

Alexis says nothing, just scans his face assessingly with wise eyes so very much older than her almost twenty-two years.

"You've been to visit Jack again," she says quietly and without judgment, but Castle still hears her silent pain even if there is not a trace of it in the carefully modulated tones of her voice.

He nods, "It's silly I guess, but-"

Alexis cuts him off suddenly as her slender form collides with his, and she hugs him as hard and as tightly as she can.

"Oh, Dad. It's not silly. It's not silly at all. It's just - you felt you owed him a confession about the divorce papers didn't you?" she whispers, and this time her emotions are carried in her voice loud and clear.

Castle bends his head and buries his face in his daughter's soft, sweet-smelling hair. Breathes the essence of her deeply into his lungs, and let's himself hold onto her for dear life now, when everything else – when all that remains is falling apart.

"Yeah," he murmurs, his voice breaking on the word. "I know it's crazy, but I wanted to tell him – I tried to explain – that it isn't what I want but that I need to set her free if I'm going to try and live any kind of life at all, I . . . "

He cuts off the rising swell of emotion, cuts off the flow of words, and Alexis just holds onto him, as she's been holding onto him for a year now. She's propped him up and tried desperately to keep him together in the wake of both her baby brother's death and her stepmother's desertion. It hasn't been easy. Not easy at all. Richard Castle is a man of deep emotions and hot passions, his devotion to those he loves almost limitless. Losing Jack was blow enough, but losing Kate as well almost ended him.

There were many days over the last year when Alexis woke from truly terrifying nightmares where the cumulative losses just swallowed her father whole. She still isn't sure that they won't, although since he got involved with the local SIDS support group a few months ago, she's been encouraged by the gradual but positive change in him. Being around other parents who've been through it, hanging out with the other Dad's – it's been a lifeline in the darkness that she's well aware her father has increasingly clung too as he came painfully to the realization that Kate was never coming back.

That she couldn't, because her husband was just too big a reminder of her son.

Alexis closes her eyes against the sting of tears and as ever tries desperately not to hate the woman she'd come to love so much, for doing this to their family. Kate lost her child, and Alexis always holds onto that fiercely as she tries to make sense of it. Of the way Kate walked away from all of them. Because Alexis lost her brother, and her father lost two of his three reasons for living, Martha lost her grandson. They all lost. Everyone lost. And things surely would have been better if they could have just stuck together.

That's where the reluctant hatred starts for Alexis, on those days when her own grief rises up and wants to swallow her; when she wonders whether she'll ever see a genuine smile from her father ever again.

Because the truth is she misses Kate too. Misses her steady presence, her gorgeous smile and her infectious laughter, the sound advice and the sense of security she'd come to depend on with Kate. She'd believed so fully that she'd always be there.

And it sucks to be wrong.

It sucks to see the guilt in her father's eyes just because he's realized the only way he can stay sane is to accept the truth that Kate Castle is gone, and that if he doesn't let her go, if he doesn't cut the ties – he isn't going to make it out of this.

And he shouldn't have to feel guilty about it. Hell her father has tried everything and then some. And all he's ever gotten in return from her since it happened has been a stone-cold front of silence. It's all that any of them have gotten from Kate. It's like they don't even exist.

Her father pushes himself gently out of her arms, disrupting her inner musings.

"You want coffee?" he asks suddenly, striving for normality she senses, "I want coffee. You can stay and join me right?" His face is still lined with that ever-present sadness she knows in her heart may never vanish, but he's trying – for her.

So she nods.

"But you have that flavored whitener right?" she asks, then she blanches when his shoulders tense and she remembers that he only ever bought that stuff for Kate. Before she can open her mouth to apologize he says, "I do actually. There's some in the top of the fridge door, can you grab it?"

Alexis nods dumbly, grabs it and hands it over before the question is burning so hotly in her mouth that she can't contain it another second longer.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you hate this stuff," she says.

"I do," he replies, lifting his straight black coffee to his lips.

"Then why it is here?" she asks.

The writer meets his daughter's eyes, "I guess I keep buying it for her – just in case," he admits carefully. "And I guess it's time I stop."

Alexis bites her lip, pouring the heavily flavored vanilla cream into her own mug to buy herself the time to formulate an answer.

"I mean, the papers are filed, and . . ." he says weakly.

"They are. Dad we've been over this."

"I know."

"For your sake Dad, that's all I care about now. For your sake you have to . . . "

"I _know_."

Silence descends over the kitchen for a long while, it's Castle who finally speaks.

"I'm heading to group, and then I'm going over some fund raising ideas for the SIDS Foundation annual dinner with Paula. Will you come?"

He's changing the subject, Alexis knows this, but she also knows that he has filed the divorce papers and if he is still holding onto some things from his marriage that she wishes he wasn't, now isn't the time to push him. Not with the anniversary of Jack's loss looming so close.

"Sure," she says brightly.

Castle nods.

"I'm going to get changed then," he says, setting his half used coffee mug down, and exiting the kitchen. Half-way across the loft he pauses.

"I'm trying pumpkin," he says without turning back towards her.

He is. She sees how hard he is. "Forget I said anything," she replies, adding "Hurry, Dad. Group starts in less than an hour and we've got to get all the way across town."

* * *

She hasn't been here with him for months, and the truth is she wouldn't have come today except that he asked her. Alexis listens to the father across the circle as he tries to speak through an avalanche of tears and her own are cloying and scratchy and choking her.

She's grateful her father has these people, but sometimes the newer members with the freshest losses just emotionally drain her. She hates bearing witness to the devastation this causes, because it's not just the loss itself, but the lack of meaningful answers when a seemingly perfectly healthy baby just dies.

Like with Jack – she'd seen him just hours earlier and he'd been so completely fine.

Alexis doesn't realize she's reached for her father's hand until the strength of his grip engulfs her trembling fingers and some of the overwhelming emotion recedes beneath his quiet calm.

"You'll get through it," she hears him say, and her eyes dart back to the dark haired man across the room from her, whose tear-filled eyes are now riveted on her father.

"How?" the stranger asks.

"A day at time. As we all do."

"But my wife, she won't talk to me," the man adds. "That's why I came here; no-one wants to talk to me about it."

"You can talk to me." She hears her father reply.

* * *

"Are you sure you want to do this?" she asks him when the group session is over for the day. It's still early but she knows her father had meetings planned.

Castle nods.

"I've texted Paula that I'll be a couple of hours later than I'd planned. It's okay Alexis."

* * *

In a booth at the Old Haunt Castle slides a stiff drink across the tabletop to his companion. The man cradles it between his palms.

"Little early," he murmurs, but there's a grateful smile on his weary face anyway. "What do I owe you?" he asks.

Castle shakes his head.

"It's my bar."

"Oh."

"My name's Rick," Castle says encouragingly.

His companion looks sheepish.

"Yeah, I know. I used to read your books," he replies. "I'm Pete."

Castle tries for an offended look to lighten the mood.

"Used to?"

Pete looks startled, "Well, I mean the last one was a couple of years ago . . ."

_Ah._

"I was almost finished with the next one when my son died," Castle offers. "I've tried, but I can't seem to finish it. Well, at least not yet."

It's what he always says when he's asked about his work, but the truth is Castle doesn't think he'll ever write again. All the words in his head, in his heart still belong to Kate, and without her-. Well there's nothing for him to say. No story he's compelled to tell.

Pete nods.

There's an awkward silence, and then Castle bites the bullet – he's brought the guy here so he can talk to him after all. So that he can try and help. It's why he goes each week isn't it? To seek that understanding. To draw strength from the shared experience so he can make it through this. He's made some friends there now, and he understands that it's all about giving back. He's not sure he's ready, but he's drawn to Pete somehow. Maybe it's what Pete confessed about the way his wife's reacting. Maybe it's because Castle can relate so specifically to that.

"Son or daughter?" he says gently.

Pete bites his lip.

"Daughter," he answers. "That was your daughter than came with you to the support group today right?"

The author inclines his head. "Yeah. Alexis is from my first marriage, she's all grown up now, though. Light of my life."

Pete hesitates before he says," How old was your son? When it happened I mean?"

Castle takes a deep breath, he's learned from group to open up about it, but it's always hard. At least until he starts and then it often just comes pouring out like a floodgate opened. How sudden it was – just out of the blue, how unforeseen. How all-consuming the loss is, how all the hope seems to have vanished from the world.

"Four months," he says, the air whooshing out of his lungs. Four tiny little months that flew by, and then Jack was just - gone. The world was bright and perfect one day, pitch-black hell the next.

"I'm so sorry. My daughter, Sophie – she was eight months. And we thought we were past that point you know, I mean you hear that from six months on the risks are lower and we just . . ."

Castle nods. "I know," he says softly. "We all blame ourselves, Pete. I can tell you from experience that there isn't a parent in the world who's lost a child to this who hasn't second guessed and turned themselves inside-out with the guilt. It's inexplicable and unexplainable and though you do the things that they say lower the risks – the truth is, sometimes it just happens. And there is no one reason why."

Pete takes a shaky sip of his bourbon. "It's good," he comments.

"My finest."

The two men contemplate their drinks for a moment, before Pete gets up the courage to ask, "Your wife wasn't with you today?"

Castle shakes his head.

"No," he says. "Kate, she hasn't – I mean we're not . . ."

He struggles to say it. He knows Pete is terrified of his own wife's reaction to the loss of their daughter. Can it really help him for Castle to confess this? Before he can decide, Pete's talking again.

"My wife, she won't talk about it. She won't let me near her. She won't cry and she won't even look at me. It's been four weeks and she's gone to stay with her mother and I'm afraid she isn't ever coming back, Rick."

"She might not, "Castle says carefully.

The other man's dark eyes latch onto his. "So your wife . . . "

"Kate doesn't handle loss very well. And I knew that about her when we met. She lost her mother when she was in college – violently. And it changed, Kate. She built up walls so thick around herself to protect her from ever having to lose like that again. And then she met me. And years later when she'd torn those walls down and we'd gotten together I thought she'd made that change permanent. I thought her walls weren't needed to protect her anymore because we had each other. But when Jack died, everything changed back again. I could see it almost instantly. She just withdrew. Physically first of all, I mean we'd held onto each other for dear life the first day. But by the next one, she wouldn't let me so much as touch her. Then she couldn't be in the same room with me, or under the same roof. Next she stopped talking to me at all. And in all honestly, Pete - I haven't even seen her in the last six months. Not because I don't love her, or miss her or want her with every fiber of my being, but because every time Kate lays eyes on me I think I put her right back there again. To that morning when she found him so still and cold in his crib and her screams – I'll hear them forever."

Castle stops, shaking. Not that he isn't used to it by now he starts shaking every single time he relives it.

"So what do I do?" Pete asks him helplessly. "How do I stop that from happening, Rick?

"You can't," Castle replies. "But you can be there. You can keep reaching out, and in the meantime you do what you need to do to take care of you. Seeking out the support group was a smart move – we've been there. We'll be here for you. Alexis had to find the group for me and I've only been involved the last few months, since I realized that Kate, well that she wasn't coming home to me."

Pete looks stricken even as he's nodding.

"Thank you," he says.

"No thanks needed, I'm not sure how much help I've been." Castle replies.

"It's good advice, Rick. And at least I've found a place I can talk about it – people I can talk about it to."

The silence this time isn't awkward, or heavy – more companionable, and then Pete breaks it.

"Do you resent her? Your wife I mean? For pushing you away"

Castle shakes his head. "I wish I could," he answers, "It would be easier to deal with than this ache, this endless ache that never – not for a second - goes away."


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three:** Your face, oh . . . your face.

* * *

He leaves Pete with his cell phone number and instructions to call him – if he ever needs to talk. And then Castle heads out to meet up with Paula and talk fundraising - because it helps, it helps to know he's contributing to research – to answers. It helps to know he's at least trying to prevent any other parent from ever having to feel this way. The way he feels.

Shattered.

It's going to be a long day.

* * *

"What are you going to do?" Lanie asks her gently, dark-eyes rising from reading the crumpled papers in her hands, compassion shining in the ebony depths.

Kate shrugs her shoulders helplessly at first, but then as Lanie's about to commiserate with her, the cop pushes herself up and off of her couch, straightens those same shoulders and declares,

"Fight. I'm going to fight," she says, a fire back in her voice that Lanie hasn't heard there in a year. A fire the M.E then promptly immediately misunderstands.

"Fight what, exactly? Kate – he's freely offering you half of everything," she says gently, pointing back at the papers in her lap. "More, if I'm reading this correctly."

Her best friend looks horrified.

_Oh No_.

"Fight to _save_ my marriage," Kate clarifies quickly. "Lanie – the last thing I want is to lose Castle. I'd do anything to prevent that."

"Oh hunnie," Lanie replies, "Have you even stopped to consider that it might be too late?"

Kate's hazel eyes widen in fear, but she nods despite it.

"Of course I have," she says, the fingers of both hands rising and tangling in the honeyed mass of her hair, tugging on in frustration. "That's _all_ I've been able to think about since those papers arrived. I know how badly I've handled this. I know what he must think," she says.

"Do you? Do you really?"

"Lane-"

"Kate, you abandoned them," she says harshly, using the tone as a wake-up call. "And I know your reasons must have seemed overwhelming at the time. I know you, I do. I know what you went through and I know you just vanished under the weight of it – but . . . "Lanie trails off.

"You can say it."

"Maybe you just aren't good for each other." Lanie says carefully. "No matter how much love there is there. Kate, when you're wounded you retreat. You retreat further than anyone I've ever met, and the wall you put up – Kate, it's impenetrable."

Kate sighs, "I know."

"It's hard to be on the outside of that," Lanie continues. "It wears a person down to be continually shoved away-"

"From the person you need the most," Kate finishes.

"You're both so different. You needed to grieve alone and he needed to grieve with you. And what got broken in the meantime – Kate, this may not be a fight you have even a prayer of winning. And for his sake – maybe you should consider that it isn't a fight you should have at all."

Beckett pales until she's almost white; flopping down onto the couch next to the M.E all the fight seems to drain right out of her.

"Please," she whispers as she grabs hold of Lanie's hand and holds on for dear life. "Please. Don't say that."

"I'm so sorry hunnie," Dr. Parish says in reply, "I'm so sorry - but I have too. Not just for his sake but for yours as well. You've both been through enough pain."

Kate lets Lanie wrap her up in a hug as her mind whirls. She doesn't want to cause Castle anymore heartache, that's the last thing she wants to do. Lanie's correct in that they've both had enough of that to last them ten lifetimes. But when she looks into her future – something she can once again do now after months and months of therapy – when she looks forward, she still sees him. In fact he's all she sees. And that's something that hasn't changed. The one constant of her life from even before they were together. He is still the one true thing that makes her life worth living, and without him – Kate can't think of a single reason she'd want to go on.

"I have to try, Lanie," she whispers against her friend's shoulder. "If there is any way, if there is any chance . . . "

Lanie hugs her harder, "All I'm saying is, you will have to live with it if there isn't. Can you let him go if it's better for him this way?"

_No. _

Kate's heart screams.

_No, no, no. Never._

"Yes," is what she finally whispers into the air though. Because she knows she owes him that, more than ever before – to do what's best for him. "But I don't believe me signing those papers is what's best. Not in the long run. This is Rick giving up, don't you see? And he never gives up. Not in the face of bombs, or freezers, or hit-men. Rejections, odds, tigers – the man never, ever quits. He's saved me, the city, and the boys – more than once, because that's who he is, Lanie. The hero. That's what he does. And it can't possibly be better for him to change now – that would just be another tragedy."

Kate pulls back then, and the look in her eyes is so powerful that it steals Lanie's immediate response away. There's such a pure love, such a raw need burning in those gorgeous eyes of hers. And such awe, such faith in what she describes that it's stunning. Devout faith in her husband. Who he is, who he's meant to remain. Faith that she can overcome the gulf that's grown between them because of her, and most importantly – at least to Lanie, faith that it's the _right_ thing, the only thing she can do.

Lanie smiles, she can't help it, because in her own heart she'd like nothing more than for her friends to be together again. "Okay," she says. "So then my original question still stands, Kate. What are you going to do?"

The cop swallows hard, her eyes showing her resolve but also an almost paralyzing fear.

"Go home," Kate says quietly. "I'm going to go home."

* * *

He get's back to the loft a little after eight pm and it feels like he's been going and going all day, and he has. Dropping his keys onto the kitchen counter Castle closes his eyes and takes a steadying breath, thankful that he's held it together today. His cell phone vibrates in his pocket and the writer pulls it free, lips turning up slightly when he sees it's from Alexis – checking in on him.

_How did the meeting(s) go?_

He knows she's not just talking about Paula.

_Fine._

He sends back, before he adds.

_He needed a friend. It's okay. I'm home now._

He waits on her reply, and when she just sends him a smiley face he knows she's stopped worrying and he's thankful for it. He's so sick of seeing worry in his daughter's eyes, can't honestly remember the last time he saw laughter there instead.

Things will get better, he tells himself. Even with the divorce looming and the financial settlement he's planned for Kate that will entail him selling this place and finding another – smaller – place to call home, it will get better. Shadows loom here, where everything both began and ended, and he's ready now, he's ready to let them go.

Shaking the thoughts away, for now at least, Castle heads for his bedroom and a more comfortable set of clothing as he tries to decide on whether or not he's hungry. He has trouble some days, getting food into his system, but it's been better lately and he thinks that tonight he might actually manage a proper meal – if there's anything in his fridge that is.

He pulls up hastily when he reaches the master bedroom though – the bed is rumpled as if someone's been laying on it, and Castle could swear he made it this morning. His eyes scan the rest of the space, before he makes his way into the bathroom, but when nothing else jumps out at him as disturbed he shakes it off. He must be forgetting, wouldn't be the first time his normally excellent memory and keen observation skills have lapsed this last year. He doesn't suppose he needs to dwell on it. Changing quickly into what was once a very fitted tee that now hangs on his thinner frame, and a worn pair of plaid pajama bottoms, the writer pads back out into the loft's great room. He's about to head into the kitchen and see what he can rustle up when he hears it – a soft thud from above.

Startled, Castle stands rooted to the spot.

It can't be his mother because Martha is out of town in the Hamptons. It can't be Alexis either because his daughter would not be texting to check up on him if she was actually here.

Listening intently he waits to see if he can hear anything else, and just when he thinks that maybe it's just his imagination running away with him he hears it again. A soft thud, and now there are footsteps, quiet – but distinctly there, and if he's not mistaken they're heading for the stairs.

Panicked the writer dashes barefoot into the kitchen, eyes scrambling for a weapon he rejects the idea of a knife outright, and instead grabs for the heavy iron skillet that sits on the stove. With it comfortingly in his hand he backs up, wonders if he should just leave the loft – raise a neighbor, surely this is the sensible plan? So he backs towards the door, grabs his cell phone as he goes past it and he's about to dial 911 when there's a movement at the top of the stairs that draws his gaze. And Castle drops both the skillet and the phone, knees almost giving out under him when he realizes who the intruder is.

No need for the cops apparently – seems they're already here.

_Kate?_

_Oh my God._

_Kate!_

His wife has stopped just two steps down the stairs, and she's staring at him. Her mouth opens and closes but she can't seem to find any words to say.

He knows just how she feels and then his knees do give out on him, and the weight of six months without the sight of her, without a word of any kind all come crashing down on Castle.

The weight of bearing two losses, hers and Jack's just too great.

Castle folds in on himself as he hits the floor, and he wraps himself up tightly in a ball.

'Go away', he hears someone yelling, before he understands that it's him.

"Please God, go away."


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: If there were just twenty eight hours in a day I'd have gotten this out sooner – alas . . .**

* * *

**Chapter Four: **I would change everything.

* * *

She wasn't expecting him to give her a warm reception, but neither was she expecting this. And as her husband continues to have a complete breakdown by the front door, Kate's mind whirls and she cannot think of anything to do.

He looks so helpless, so diminished, and if she wasn't already almost overwhelmed by the end result of her actions – she is now.

Shakily she forces herself to just move from her position near the top of the stairs, and with wobbly knees she makes her way slowly down them, still desperately trying to find her voice so that she can say something. Anything - even if it's only a plethora of apologies for coming here.

What was she thinking? She should have called or something, reached out another way instead of surprising him.

God, she didn't mean to do this to him; she didn't mean any of it. The stark reality that she's almost entirely responsible for reducing the incredible, strong, funny, endlessly compassionate man she married to this . . . this.

Her feet hit the hardwood floor at the base of the stairs finally, and Kate sways in place. The loft feels so huge, and so empty, and as tight a ball as he's curled himself into, her husband seems so small.

So lost.

So vastly different from the broad, comforting presence she holds in her mind, and all she wants in this moment is some magic way to fix him. All she wants to see is the Castle who inhabits her heart.

"Rick?"

The fact that she's finally found her voice seems to rouse him, and as quickly as he curled in on himself he suddenly straightens himself out, and just as quickly her husband pushes to his feet. When his eyes meet hers there's a desolation in them that makes her gasp, but then he blinks almost deliberately and it's gone, replaced by a cold fury instead.

"What are you doing here?"

She wants to reply with, "I live here', but she hasn't set foot in the loft since a month after Jack's passing, lost in her devastation she couldn't bear to be home.

"I . . ." One word is all the explanation he permits her.

"Get out." The words are low and menacing.

"Castle-"

"GET OUT," he repeats. "Kate, please. Please just go away."

He turns then. Turns his back on her and walks towards their bedroom and his request hits her hard because she remembers every single one of his overtures the last year. Every time he called her, every message that he left. Every hand-written note, every text message, every email that he's sent begging her to just 'talk' to him, even every time he turned up at the precinct and she did what he's doing now and she resolutely walked away.

And it's like a knife. Pain so sharp and deep and it cuts so badly and she's sorry, she's so very sorry she wasn't ready to see before now how awful she's been. How very much she's contributed to the hell he's obviously been living in.

It's just that, Jack was such a miniature of his father. The shape of his head, the color of his hair, the blue of his eyes, the lopsided smile - even the innocent way he would laugh. Every time she looked at Castle, or heard his voice – she saw her baby lying there – motionless. Every time. It's taken almost a year for that to change, for her to see Castle again instead of Jackson. For her to see a reason to fight, instead of a mountain made of pain.

If she could just explain that – if she could just be allowed to try. Maybe he could see a way to understand and forgive her, even if he's never willing to risk loving her again.

Oh that hurts. God, that hurts – the thought that he's walled himself off from her, just as she did from him. And what right does she have to even be hurt by any behavior of his at this point?

None.

But it doesn't matter – she hurts anyway.

So the second her husband disappears from view, Kate swallows heavily and forces her feet to follow him. She finds him sitting with his back to her on their (his) bed. He senses immediately that she's there.

"I thought I asked you to leave?" The sheer volume of heartache in his low voice is staggering – it's enough to rock Kate back on her heels.

"I can't," she whispers.

His shoulders lift as a harsh bark of laughter escapes him, the bitterness in the sound echoes all around them.

"Yeah, well I can't either. I can't do _this_, Kate. I can't talk to you when I've finally reached the point where there are no more words left to say." Castle drops his head into his hands and she aches with it then, fingers itching, heart racing as she swallows the desire to close the distance between them and hold him.

It takes her by complete surprise actually, how immediate and instinctual the urge.

She hasn't been able to stand being touched the last year, some form of self-inflicted punishment Dr. Burke patiently explained to her. But suddenly it's different; suddenly she's craving the contact – if only from him.

"If you can't talk, Rick, then just listen," she pleads.

Her husband shakes his head.

"To what? What can you possible have to say to me now? Now, after a year of basically ignoring my existence," he says, his voice rising with anger as he pushes himself up off of the bed and finally turns to confront her. "You left _me_, Kate. You left me alone when I needed you the most and you don't need to tell me it's because you couldn't cope with what had happened. I know that – I know that better than anyone because I couldn't cope with it either. It doesn't make what you did okay – nothing is ever going to make what you did to this family okay. Nothing."

"I'm so sorry," she says, the words stumbling over each other. "I'm so, so sorry, Castle."

"I don't care," he replies.

Kate shakes her head at the words, hands balling into fists at her side she wants to punch the words right out of the air, because she deserves them.

"I _can't_ care anymore, Kate." The truth of it is written starkly in the sapphire blue of his eyes, he's shutting off his feelings for her in a desperate act of self-preservation, one she can barely stand to see.

"You don't mean that," she says shakily.

Castle runs a tired hand through his hair, mussing it completely.

"Oh, but I do." The resignation in his tone is chilling, it reminds her immediately of what she told Lanie – how she justified trying to save the mess she's made of her marriage at all, Castle's given up.

Hollow, the silence stretches between them as they stare each other down; Kate searches her husband's face for any sign of compassion, and any hint that the cold fury he's showing her is just a thin front she can breach.

But his tired, angry, heart-breakingly handsome face is like rock now– immoveable.

"I don't need to hear you say you're sorry," he explains at length. "So if that's why you came here today – save it, Kate. Just sign the divorce papers and leave me be. _You _decided for us that we were over when our son died, so leave it at that. I've got no more fight left in me, okay. But I need to reclaim what's left of me."

"Castle, no."

The writer arches his eyebrow with disdain.

'No? Kate, I'm giving you everything you could hope to get freely . . ."

"No," she says again, stepping closer only to find Castle backing up. "I don't want to sign the papers – Castle, I can't. I can't let you go; I don't want to let you go. Rick, I still love you."

Angry, frustrated tears fill his eyes at her declaration, and he seems surprised when he wipes his palm across them to discover the moisture there – and that scares her.

He shakes his head.

"You _don't_ love me, Kate. Maybe you think you do, but I don't think you ever really did. To be brutally honest I don't think you even know how. And before you tell me that's too harsh and don't I remember everything we meant to each other, all we did for each other – everything we had to go through to get to where I thought we were – just stop and remember that you were the one who walled up her heart and was able to walk away. So whatever you felt for me, Kate – please don't call it love because I'd rather believe you never loved me than be loved that way again."

He can't mean that! He can't think she doesn't love him with everything in her – he can't, he just can't. "Castle-"

"No, I mean it, Kate. With two exceptions everyone I've ever loved has only offered me love that went so far. Love that didn't put me first and I'm not built like that. I never was. So if Alexis and my mother are destined to be the only sources of love in my life – that's okay." Castle takes a shuddering breath, "After you, Kate – after you there will never be another chance for love anyway."

He states it so plainly, so flatly and with so little emotion that it tears her in two.

"Rick, please-"

"It doesn't matter," he says, dismissively now, once more turning his back on her and wandering over towards the window. The light from the bedside lamp casts shadows lovingly across the angles of his face and though he looks broken he's so beautiful to her that she steps closer without realizing it, like a moth drawn to a flame.

Castle tenses.

"Don't," he says the warning heavy in his tone as he holds his hand up like he's warding her away. "Kate – just go," he pleads softly, his tormented eyes falling closed.

But she can't do it, even as indecision shreds up her insides. Every action in her head leads her in a circular route nowhere and she aches now - with this ever growing need to bury herself in his strong embrace, even as she sees so clearly that Lanie was right to warn her as she did. This is so much worse than anything Kate had dared to anticipate – maybe because when she's hurt him in their past he's always been so quick to forgive her.

The cop realizes with a startling clarity that she was counting heavily on that – for all her big talk otherwise. Despite maintaining to both Dr. Burke and to her best friend that she was well aware that things had gone wrong for too long this time – was she? Was she really?

Eyeing the man she loves as he stands so alone, so rigid and unyielding – so very different from the man she married two years ago, whose open heart and bottomless love for her was the greatest gift of her life, it hits Kate sharply, that this really is - unfixable.

It hits so sharply that she can't even breathe. Her lungs seize up and refuse to draw breath, her heart pounds so loudly and so fast that it feels like it's going to just explode out of her chest. There's pressure in her head, a knife in her gut and it's every bit as terrifying as the morning their son died. It's just as daunting and impossible.

It's the purest form of agony she's known yet.

And this is where he's been living - oh she _finally, finally_ understands as she experiences it for herself. _This_ is what she made him live with while she was hoarding her grief, and barricading her heart away. She made him live with losing their love – all those beautiful, breathtaking, endless feelings that existed between them.

The tears are rapid and blinding, and Kate fumbles for the bed, her legs folding beneath her when she finds it. Awareness of the room, of her husband still standing unbending and apart from her fades away, and all Kate sees is the reality that she's left with – nothing.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**: Can't move my lips, but my heart is screaming.

* * *

He wonders if she's got any idea how hard she's crying, but he doesn't think so. He doesn't think he's ever seen anyone sob quite this way – with their whole body, even as it's remarkable how quiet it is. Her breathing is erratic, shallow one moment – full-out gasping the next, her shoulders heave and the volume of tears pouring down her face – he doubts she can see anything right now.

It should be incredible painful for him to watch – but he feels nothing. Seriously – nothing, and it scares him terribly that this is true but he's completely unmoved by the desolation sweeping through her, and he doesn't understand at all why this is the case. Even with everything that's happened to them, Kate's pain should move him he thinks – it should. He's ached with her loss for so long now yet tonight when she turned up here it just – vanished.

One moment he's crippled by the weight of things crashing down on him and the next he's gone completely numb inside save wave after wave of anger buffeting him, anger that literally picked him up off of the floor.

And Castle doesn't know what to make of that. He's – confused.

Exiting the bedroom through his office, the writer leaves his wife to her misery for the moment. He needs to think and he can't when she's right there in front of him.

The office is dark save the ambient light from the street outside that filters through the blinds over the windows, and Castle sinks gratefully down into the chair behind his desk, his brilliant mind whirling as he tries to sort out the tangled jumble of thoughts in his head. Only one of which is clear in this moment - his filing for divorce has obviously woken Kate up out of whatever stupor or bubble she was living in.

And though he might not feel much else right now, he does understand that his anger is coming directly from how very much he hates that.

He hates so badly that the moment when he'd finally reached some sort of peace with everything, the moment when he'd accepted that he could and should – no more than that – that he _had _to let go – that was the moment when Kate decided she couldn't let him.

It's typical – it truly is.

He feels on the one hand like he should have seen this coming, (she does have a pattern there) and on the other like he's been blindsided by a truck because God knows he's tried so hard to get through to her before this. He's tried – everything, for a year.

He's given her space, but he stayed in contact. He sent her messages, he sought her out – he turned himself inside out and upside down in the hope that something he did would reach through her walls and enable her to reach back out for him. And he failed. Every attempt to locate his wife in the woman she'd suddenly become – failed dismally, and so he'd accepted it. He'd come to peace with her loss even though it's shattered him.

And as the writer sorts methodically through the maelstrom of thoughts within him he realizes the numbness comes from the scattered pieces of what's left of who he used to be. Pieces that are trying desperately to knit themselves back together and will not face even the possibility of allowing her to hurt him again.

It's simply not in him at this point to do it. And he can't see how it ever could be again.

Wasn't it Einstein who said, 'the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.' Well he was that way for a year –insane with it. His heart and soul broken and his mind – fragmenting - as he tried over and over and over and over. It got him nowhere. So he stopped, and he accepted, and he went about gathering the pieces of his life until he could stake some claim on his sanity again.

And if he plans on staying that way – he's got to stay strong against the lure of her, and that means getting her out of here before she does find a way through this wonderful barrier of numbness and anger that's sprung up around him like a fortress. A castle to protect a Castle – his brain helpfully supplies, and he holds onto it – to the mental image of something strong and impenetrable keeping these overtures of hers at bay.

He doesn't doubt for a moment that he still loves her – he always has, it was a part of him almost right from the moment she first told him her name. He just knows now that he can't let that love out, can't let it have power over him. It won't ever die, it will always be with him – but he can never allow it to control him or his actions ever again.

It's the opposite – the polar opposite of who he's always been, the way he's lived his life. But he can't see any other way so he swallows back the lump in his throat that wants to strangle him, and get's up out of his chair.

Kate needs to leave. And she needs to leave now.

Castle forces his lungs to draw air and then he blows it out between his pursed lips slowly, trying to get his heart to calm down and stop the rapid hammering its doing in his chest. His stomach is churning suddenly and he feels sick as he heads back into the bedroom to confront her again. He truly doesn't want to hurt her, it isn't malice that means he has to be so cold now – it's just self-preservation, because that's all there is.

He will preserve the fragile peace he's found, he has no other practical choice left.

Castle doesn't look at her as he enters the room - he doesn't dare. Instead his ears strain to pick up the sound of her, and it's only when the author hears nothing that he allows his eyes find her form - she's right where he left her, still curled up on his (their) bed.

She's - unmoving.

It freaks him out for single moment, a silent scream trapped in his lungs as he flashes back a year, but then he blinks and it's gone and Castle realizes he must have been sitting in the dark of his office for a lot longer than he'd supposed. And now that he looks closer he can see she's breathing, her torso rises slightly with every even breath.

She's just asleep.

Kate's curled tightly into a ball on the far end of their bed, her rest looks uncomfortable - like exhaustion and he feels it too suddenly. The weight of this long day pressing down on him from every angle, squeezing on him like a vice.

The writer sighs heavily – he could wake her, of course he could. He could remake his demands, he could beg again even - that she goes away. Instead Castle finds his feet carrying him closer, almost against his will until he looms over her in dimness of the room, staring down into her tear-stained face where it's pillowed on the fingers of her right hand.

She hasn't been here in just so long - and with her silent and still like this - making no demands of him, it's overwhelming in a different way than before.

He swallows unsteadily, because the lamp is still on at the side of the bed and it casts a gentle glow across her lovely face, illuminating her in all her glory. He has no control whatever over how greedily he maps her features now. No control over how it punches him in the gut all fresh and new how beautiful she really is. Behind his walls his heart quakes, screams even, pleads with his mind to be allowed to touch her again, wants nothing more than for him to gather her up in his arms and hold her close – to never let her go again.

But he didn't let her go because he wanted to, his mind remembers. He let her go because he'd had all he could take.

Still, he physically shakes with it, this internal battle between the heart Kate destroyed that will undoubtedly love her always, and the mind that's firmly in control and steadfastly refusing to bend. Minutes pass and Castle remains petrified to the spot, trembling until the light from a passing car bounces off the ceiling and hits the diamond that sits sparking on his wife's left hand.

She's still wearing his ring.

And he can't help it then – can't help but vividly recall the day when he gave it to her, how happy they were – how it seemed so many obstacles had been finally overcome and they were perched on the verge of the greatest chapter in their lives.

Kate gave him all his dreams when she agreed to marry him, then gave him all he never dared to dream when she bore him his son. It was everything – the life he'd held in his hands back then, and though he knows no one is to blame for Jack's death, she is entirely to blame for taking all the rest away. So damn her beauty and damn her tears, damn her to hell for ever coming back here.

Another car passes and the ring catches the light again – mocking him, and with grim determination the writer hauls himself away from her.

She can spend the night – but that's all the concession he's ever going to make.


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: Forgive me for two things: 1. How long this took to be posted (even though I published the one-shot 'One Thing' in the meantime) and 2. For the group 'thank you' for all of your amazing reviews for the previous chapter, I suck, I know.**

* * *

**Chapter Six:** There's still some use in trying.

* * *

She wakes up stiff and some really weird combination of exhausted and yet strangely refreshed, until she looks around and remembers where she is –then its just all consuming exhaustion that comes crashing down over her.

It's one thing to 'know' it seems, and entirely another to 'see' how badly she's hurt him. So badly that she's destroyed the love he felt for her and there seems to be nothing she can say that can get through to him. And Kate doesn't know how to live with that. Hand on her heart she cannot even begin to see a way – but she doesn't feel any blame towards him for this, these are her mistakes. He's reached his limit and just as Lanie warned her she's going to have to live with it that she succeeded in driving him away.

So what now?

Pushing herself up into a sitting position, Kate scans scratchy eyes around what up until a year ago was her bedroom, their bedroom. It shouldn't be, but it feels like some small, weak victory that at least nothing in the room has changed.

The same animal prints adorn the walls, there are the same lamps, the same comforter. Everything looks completely as it was to her detective's sensibilities until she remembers that there used to be a copy of one of their wedding photos on the top of the dresser – it's no longer there – that's the only thing that's out-of-place.

The photo is gone, and its absence sends her stomach into cart-wheels. Bile rises up her throat and her heart starts this furious and erratic pounding. He's erasing them, erasing her. First with the divorce papers and now with missing photos and then it hits her that it's the following morning already and she's here in their room, in her clothes and she's all alone.

The room is as tranquil and beautiful as it ever was, and it's never felt less like she belongs there.

Frantically Kate scrambles off the bed and heads for the dresser, scanning the top of it yields nothing. The surface isn't dusty and the photo hasn't miraculously appeared, so pushing aside any qualms she has about ransacking his drawers she starts pawing through underwear and shirts trying to locate it.

She should go, she should leave him be, remove herself from his space and yet she can't leave without that photo. All those months ago she just packed a bag and walked out leaving everything else she owned here, and she's never come back for anything. What she's needed – she purchased. Hell she rented a place with furniture because there was a small functioning part of her that always knew in her heart it was supposed to be temporary. God, how unfair is that – she realizes in a flash of empathy – that she always knew she intended to come back here. Why the hell did she never let him know? She could have just said something any of the times he reached out? If she'd just said . . .

Where the hell is this damn photo? Kate tears open another draw, looking like a thief now as she ransacks through his things. She wants it ,their wedding photo – she needs it. It has to be here somewhere – unless . . . unless . . .

She can't complete the thought that he gave it away, or worse – that he destroyed it.

He wouldn't, he couldn't – could he?

There is nothing in any of his drawers, nothing but clothing so she slams them all shut again in frustration, tears filling her eyes and she wants him – she wants him so badly. His arms, his smile – and she's no right to want what she so long shunned because it hurt so badly, any reminder of Jack's little face.

Desperate, Kate starts on the drawers that had been hers – before - and when she rips open the very first one – there it is. The photo is safe. It stares up at her from within a nest of her underwear and Kate reaches for it with eager fingers that wrap shakily and reverently around the expensive silver frame.

She cradles it to her body, arms wrapping around her torso as her head drops forward and she hides her grief behind the curtain of her hair.

A long moment later she sinks into the armchair in the corner of the bedroom, and she lets herself look at who they used to be.

It's unbelievably painful.

The photo was their favorite from the hundreds of shots their photographer snapped that day. Neither of them is actually looking at the camera – far too lost in looking at each other, and Kate knows that's exactly why each of them loved it.

Captured on the stairs inside the New York Public Library, Castle is helping her descend them safely without her treading on the skirt of her ivory-silk dress. She'd stumbled, she remembers it vividly and he'd caught her up in his arms, pulled her flush against him and they'd laughed, they'd just laughed into each others faces from the sheer happiness of it all. He'd caught her, just as he always had and it had been this perfect moment that the photo had captured in time.

Them - so them, and so in love, and finally to each other what they'd always been destined to become. The photo is perfect to Kate and this; this beauty that she's looking at, this perfect moment is what she had and what her grief caused her to throw away.

No wonder he put it away then, she thinks. No wonder he couldn't stand to look at it – but she can't stop.

She traces her fingertips over his form, reads the love that radiates out of the photo, hears the vows he made to her that day as clear as if he were speaking them again now, not just in her head.

'_Nothing will ever change my love for you.'_

He'd declared.

'_Nothing will ever make me look away, or stray from your side.'_

He'd sworn.

'_Nothing you do, or say, could ever drive me away, Kate. I'm yours – I will be yours – always.'_

He'd promised.

You promised Castle – you said _nothing_.

And she'd promised to him the very same. Dammit, she'd promised him the very same.

The memories galvanize the crippled woman inside her. He'd meant every word, she knows this, and she can see it on his face even – here in this perfect damn photo. None of what they'd sworn to each other on their wedding day was a lie.

She won't let it become one now.

She can't.

Not because of Jack. Dear, sweet, beautiful Jack – who was such a gift. Their gift – for the four wonderful months they got to have with him.

It wasn't enough. No amount of time would ever have been enough – but every day of it was wonderful. Perfect. And every moment of his life is worth remembering.

Kate's heaves a huge breath into her lungs and holds it there within her. She holds back the grief and holds onto the joy instead - the pure joy that was a small, unfinished little life. She holds onto Jack, and how he came to be - her bottomless love for her amazing partner and all those promises that they'd made between them.

Blowing the breath out, the cop lets the hopelessness she awoke with this morning go right along with it, and Kate focuses back on the happy, smiling, adoring man she sees in the photograph in her hands instead.

Her husband – Rick Castle, the 'real' Rick Castle, this is who she's fighting for here.

She will do anything; give anything to see him this unencumbered again – this joyful – this free again. Even with what's happened there _must _be a way and she will find it because she owes it to who he used to be – that incredible person who believed in magic and aliens and Bigfoot. She will do it because of how happy she knows she once made him. She vowed 'nothing' would chase her away and she will honor that vow even when it's Castle who's doing the chasing. Kate smiles suddenly, real, genuine, a smile with purpose because she can almost, almost, hear the man he was before silently cheering her on and demanding that she not let last night's disastrous encounter phase her.

So she should go and find him. She should go now – if he's here of course. It's perfectly possible that he left sometime last night while she was kind of 'out-of-it' and that she'll need to wait him out – somehow. She isn't sure how yet – after all Castle has resources and another home even, but no, first things first – she should establish if he's still here in the loft before she does anything.

Getting off the bed, Kate debates what to do with the photograph, she wants it with her so badly and she wants just as badly to see it put it back out on the dresser. She settles for nestling it back in the drawer instead – where Castle can retrieve it if – no – _when_ he's ready.

Next she heads into the bathroom – the only thing that's changed in here is that Bobba Fett is gone. It brings the tears instantly to her eyes again. Even though she kinda hated the thing (in the bathroom anyway), it represented something of her husband's innocent inner-child and so its absence is really jarring.

_Oh Castle._

Again Kate digs deep and pushes the unexpected find to the far back of her mind and concentrates on washing her face free of tear-stained make-up and despair instead. Once she's freshly scrubbed she borrows his toothbrush and tells herself that it's not intruding – even though she knows it is. She tells herself she's just being practical, that she's his wife – but the truth is she's just going with what makes her feel even the slightest bit closer to him.

Even if stolen and unknown closeness is all it really is.

Catching sight of her reflection in the huge bathroom mirror the cop studies her bare visage critically. She looks tired, and older than she should look and her eyes are still a little red and overly puffy from the massive sobbing outbreak of the night before, still - when she looks closer she can see something in her eyes that's finally returned and it lifts her, pushes her onwards again.

Spirit.

There's spirit glinting once more in her forest-colored eyes, flashes of green and gold in the hazel sheen of them again and it truly feels good. It feels really good to see it in her face again – feels good to know she still has it inside her.

It carries Kate back out of the bathroom. Then it carries her through the bedroom and past the sad sight of the huge but empty crumpled bed before it takes her out into the loft's main living space - where it almost immediately up and deserts her in the face of the step-daughter she encounters there.

"Kate?" The surprise in Alexis' voice is so loud, so loud and so very disbelieving.

"Alexis, I . . ."

"Oh, Kate. Thank God."

The crash of the girl into her almost knocks Kate clean off her feet, but it's the ferocity of the young woman's embrace that just completely confuses things.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: Thank you for the continued support, I can't convey properly how much your kind words and enthusiasm mean to me even when I haven't been able to respond to you all individually. Also, I warned you this story was angsty, what is revealed in this chapter happens in order to bring Castle & Beckett back together, there had to be a catalyst, so I ask you to trust me.  
**

* * *

**Chapter Seven: **It never rains but it pours.

* * *

It's been a nightmare for Alexis to get there. The power is down for ten blocks around her father's loft and the streets are in worse than usual morning chaos with traffic lights out and everyone in their cars reduced to moving at a snails pace. .

She's been trying for over an hour to call her Dad, his cell phone must either be off or totally out of power because it doesn't even ring – it just goes instantly to his messaging service and the loft's hard line must be out because of the power cut because it just doesn't ring at all. Entering the lobby Alexis notes the building's own emergency generator has the lights up and running, but that's all – and as she takes the stairs she can't help but think that her Dad probably hasn't even noticed that nothing else is functional -that of course if he's even up yet.

She's shaking as she slips her key into the lock, she's got to find him quickly and let him know what's going on, but she's got no idea how she can possibly break more bad news to a man who's already lost so much in the last year. She's been trying to find the words since the moment the phone call woke her up at 6am this morning and she listened in a bleary daze to words that seemed to make no sense at all.

Devastating words that wrapped around her heart like a vice and had her instantly wishing she could just be a child again so she wouldn't have to face this like a grown-up.

Words that should have spoken to her father directly – but since no-one could get a hold of him. _Dammit Dad._

The young red-head shakes her head, shakes the fleeting annoyance away. It doesn't matter, and it doesn't change anything except that she's going to have to find strength enough for both of them as she tries to steer him through this latest catastrophe. Strength that's already exhausted because the truth is Alexis is scared out her mind and desperately needs her father to lean on but with him already being so fragile . . .

Scanning the loft with already tear-filled eyes the author's daughter hears soft noises of movement coming from her father's bedroom and she's about to call out to him when she's rendered mute by the emergence of her step-mother in the bedroom doorway.

Kate doesn't notice her at first, she just passes into the main room looking pale and red-eyed and like she's been sleeping in her clothes, and Alexis wavers between angry and utterly relieved to see her.

The feeling of relief comes as a complete surprise, and for an instant it freezes the writer's daughter to the spot. _What the hell?_ She thinks. But then the urgency of the current crisis reasserts itself and Alexis knows that she's relieved mainly because Kate's still a cop.

She has no idea what's finally brought Kate home or why. No idea what this means or how her father has reacted or whether the older woman is just here to collect some stuff. All Alexis knows is that the dizzying swirl of emotions inside her suddenly lands on thankful, thankful that just maybe Kate being here might make this easier - might make answers easier to come by.

The detective finally spots her and what little color was there completely drains from the older woman's lovely face. Guilt and shame flood the cop's hazel eyes and she opens her mouth to offer an explanation for her presence, "Alexis I-"

But Alexis is already moving, she can't contain it, she's carrying around this awful, terrifying news that she has to break and she doesn't know how and Kate is here, Kate is here and Kate will know – won't she? It has to be a sign that she's here, here when Alexis needs her. Kate will know what to do and Alexis just needs someone's arms around her, someone to tell her everything is going to turn out okay, that she isn't going to lose another person that she loves or see anymore devastation in her father's beloved face.

She may still be blindingly angry at all this woman for all she's put her father through, but right now, right now she just needs Kate's support and so Alexis finds herself slamming into her father's wife and wrapping shaking slender arms around her.

"Oh Kate, thank God."

Alexis is holding on to her _so_ tightly, and it takes Kate a moment to gather herself both from the shock of having to confront Alexis right now, and from this completely unexpected reaction. She'd have put every penny she has on Alexis hating the sight of her – and she wouldn't blame the girl for a second if that was her reaction, but instead Alexis is hugging her and as the initial shock wears off Kate finds her arms wrapping themselves around Castle's grown daughter and squeezing her back.

The cop is about to let loose the litany of apologies and promises that are sitting on her tongue when it dawns on her that Alexis isn't just hugging, she's shaking, in fact she's shaking all over and Kate realizes the young woman is crying.

That realization immediately halts the words she was going to say.

"Alexis? Alexis, what is it?"

The author's daughter just breaks down harder and Kate's thoughts scramble for purchase. What on earth is the matter? Oh, God – no it can't be . . .

"Is Rick okay? Alexis? Please, sweetheart – just tell me your father's okay?"

Pushing the young woman back slightly the brunette detective grasps her firmly by the shoulders and forces the younger woman to look at her.

"Alexis, please. What's going on? What's happened? God, Alexis you have to tell me Castle's okay? Please, just tell me he's okay?"

Alexis nods.

"It's not Dad, Kate. It's Grams. It's Grams."

Kate's heart almost stops in her chest, it stutters, the beats erratic for moment before it starts beating so hard the sound of it feels like the only thing she can hear. Her mouth goes dry and when she opens it to speak no sound escapes – until she swallows heavily and makes herself try again.

"What's happened to Martha?"

Alexis closes her eyes and bites her lip hard in an effort to gather her wits about her.

"She's been shot." The words are quiet and small but they sound like a thunderclap in the expansive room surrounding them.

"Oh my God," Kate breathes. Wrapping Alexis up in her arms again she rests her head atop the girl's soft hair. "I'm so sorry," she murmurs. "Where is she? What can I do? Just tell me what you need Alexis. I'll go, I'll stay, just tell me okay – tell me what I can do to help you, if there is anything at all?"

Alexis sniffs.

"I have to tell Dad. Kate, I have to tell Dad and I don't know what to say. He's been through so much and I'm scared . . . I'm so scared to tell him."

Kate takes a deep breath, her heart is still racing and her legs feel strange beneath her. Grief, an emotion she's intimately acquainted with tears through her, as does doubt. She's been concentrating on how she can reach Castle through all his walls, how she can get him to 'see' her again and now this. She has to put aside everything she wants right now and do only what's best for this family.

She steers Alexis over to the couch and tugs her down to sit beside her, keeping a tight grip on her step-daughter's slight hands.

"What do you know?" she asks. "Do you know how it happened? What her condition is?"

Alexis nods, and the look on her face is beyond scared. Kate recognizes it, she's seen it in the mirror – it's a mix of rage and sorrow.

"There was a home invasion at the Hamptons' house in the early hours of this morning. The man Grams has been seeing is dead, Kate. I got a call from a nurse in the hospital she's been airlifted to, she's critical but alive and they were taking her into surgery, something about bleeding into her brain. They've been trying to reach Dad for several hours this morning, but the power is out and I guess the phone line must be down too. His cell isn't picking up either. Is he here?"

Kate shrugs.

"I'm not sure. I completely surprised him when I turned up here and we didn't really talk all that much last night. I can't blame him, he really didn't want me here and well I guess I cried myself to sleep and he left me to it. I woke up this morning in my clothes and I was just going to check the guest room and see if I could talk to him before I left when I ran into you."

The author's daughter nods, her eyes immediately seeking the stairs to the loft's upper floor where the spare room is located.

"How am I supposed to tell him Grams might die, Kate? First Jack-"the young woman's voice breaks on her brother's name and she just stares at Kate helplessly, still the cop hears everything Alexis cannot say.

_First Jack, then you Kate, and now his only parent. How much more is he supposed to handle before he can't handle it anymore? _

"I'll go up with you." Kate offers. "And if he's here then I'll stay with you while you tell him. If this happened in the Hamptons Alexis, then I can call Chief Brady. I can find out what's being done to hunt down the person who did this. I promise you - and I know my promises don't mean much under the circumstances - but please at least believe that I love your grandmother. And I will make sure that the person who did this to her is caught – I swear it. You can leave that part to me, okay sweetheart? And you just get your father to Martha's side as quickly as you can."

Alexis tugs on Kate's hand.

"He's going to need us both," she says urgently, not quite knowing why the words are coming from her mouth or why she believes in them. "He's going to need you," she adds.

Kate shakes her head softly, but the conflicting emotions she's feeling are clearly rampaging across her face and through her eyes. Alexis can tell that Kate wants nothing from her father right now – nothing other than to be there for him.

"I don't want to cause him anymore stress." Kate says softly but firmly. "I _can't_ make this any harder on him by forcing him into dealing with me right now. I'll stay of course while you need me to, but then I have to do whatever it is that he wants Alexis. You can't know how I wish that it could be me, but it isn't going to be me that he needs."

There is real sincerity all over the older woman's face, and Alexis doesn't know why she believes when Kate wasn't there the last time she was needed, but maybe its just the simple fact that Kate is making no excuses for her behavior and that's why it allows Alexis to believe her now. Because it must surely have taken a lot of courage for this woman to face up to everything she's done, all the hurt she added to, and finally come back here. Alexis doesn't know how exactly this is going to work, but she can't shake the feeling that Kate's presence _will_ help and that the last thing she's going to do is fail this family again.

The thoughts do rock Alexis though. She's been so serious in encouraging her father to finally move on. It was even her gentle suggestion that he should think about filing for divorce, because Alexis knew he'd never start living again while he was still on-hold for Kate in his mind.

There is so much that needs to happen, and there really is no way that Kate could ever deserve her Dad, his heart or his devotion again, but she knows beyond a shadow of doubt that this woman is the love of her father's life regardless. And right now, right now he's going to need every tiny bit of support that Alexis can muster for him, and hell Alexis needs that support too.

Kate is here. She's here, and Alexis believes nothing so much as that her presence right now is the universe trying to tell her something.

She increases the pressure on Kate's hand.

"Kate," she pleads, "I don't care about who did this right now, I just care about breaking the news to Dad and getting to Gran. Just be here, for me if not for him – I don't want to face this on my own, please. You know what this news is going to do to him – you better than anybody."

Kate holds her step-daughter's gaze but it's her own mother's face she sees.

"Okay," she agrees. 'I'll stay with you whatever happens. I'll be here Alexis, this time you can count on me."

They head for the stairs together, and Alexis doesn't let go of Kate's hand for a moment.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight: **Back against the wall.

* * *

At the top the stairs Kate's knees begin to tremble. She's broken bad news, the _worst _news to hundreds of people over her years as a detective – but it never gets easier and although Martha's still alive, Kate thinks this might prove to be the most nervous that she's ever felt.

_Oh God, Martha._

It puts Kate's heart right into her throat just thinking about what could be happening in that operating room right now as the doctor's fight to save this amazing, vibrant, wonderful woman who Kate's come to completely love.

And as much as it's breaking Kate - what's happened to her marriage - she knows she'd rather give Castle up forever than to have him face the same pain that she's lived with since she was nineteen years old. And really, it's worse for him in some ways – isn't it – because it's not like he'll still have his father, his mother is all he's got.

The cop shakes her head to clear the spiraling thoughts and squeezes tightly onto Alexis' hand instead, shooting the girl a small encouraging smile that she manages to pull out of nowhere.

"Guest room?" she asks quietly.

Alexis nods. "Seems like the most likely place for him to be."

Kate leads the way, determined now to take this burden off of her husband's daughter; there are some words people should just never have to say.

Swallowing a wave of nausea, Kate pushes the guest room door open as confidently as she can, not knowing whether to be relieved or terrified when she finds Castle still sleeping in the room's queen-sized bed.

A glance at Castle's daughter shows the young red-head already in tears so Kate frees her hand and crosses the room alone. Steeling her courage she sits on bed beside him and reaches out a hand to shake his shoulder. His bare shoulder, a fact that shouldn't even register right now, but she can't help if the smooth, warm feeling of his skin against her fingers burns within her. She hasn't touched him in so, so long – it's hard in the moment to comprehend how she's been able to stand it.

He doesn't immediately stir, totally sacked out, so Kate tightens the grip she has on him and shakes him harder.

"Rick," she murmurs her voice far too quiet and somewhat trapped in her throat, she coughs to clear it, "Rick, wake-up."

He stirs, but it's not much more than his face crumpling into a frown and the shift of his wide shoulders against sheets. She tries again.

"Rick? Rick, (she has to swallow the word 'baby' before it can escape) you need to wake up, Castle. Castle, come on."

This time his eyes open, slivers of bright blue that find hers like a heat-seeking missile, and she wonders if it was because of the usage of his last name. He sits up quickly, the sheet falling away from his torso revealing the entire expanse of his broad chest and Kate has to fight with her own eyes to keep them on his. Her small hand is still on his shoulder and the flare of pain in her gut when he backs away from her is impossible to ignore.

He doesn't appear to have noticed Alexis yet, just rubs at his face and says wearily, "Kate, you need to get out of here."

"Something's happened," she says neutrally, trying to erase everything she's feeling except compassion from her face. "Castle, I'm so sorry but Martha's been hurt."

His jaw slackens and it's then that he notices his daughter standing in the doorway of the room.

"Alexis?"

The young woman's lip trembles and she looks to Kate blindly as a fresh wave of tears slips down her pale face.

"Alexis?" Castle asks again.

"Dad, I-"

Kate draws a deep breath and reaches for his hand, gripping his fingers tightly so that although he tries he can't pull them free. It's enough to have his focus back on her in a heartbeat.

"Kate-"

His handsome face his twisted with worry, eyes silently begging her to just say it already.

"It looks like a home-invasion," she says softly.

A bright fear flashes recognizably across his eyes and his jaw tightens perceptively.

"Is she . . . is she alive?" he grinds out.

Kate nods, "She's in surgery, Rick. Alexis wasn't given all the details but we do know that the man your mother was seeing is dead, and that Martha has some bleeding in her brain. They're operating right now to relieve the pressure."

Castle swallows rapidly, like he's trying to prevent himself from being sick.

"How?"

That's all the question he actually asks, but Kate understands it.

"She was shot." Eyes filling with tears she adds, "Castle, I'm so sorry."

Her husband's mouth opens and closes and he screws his eyes shut for a moment as he gathers himself. Kate waits for him to tightly thank her for staying to break the news before he politely asks her yet again to go. In fact she's mentally preparing for a fight with him, for how she's going to word it that Alexis has asked for her support. It completely floors her when his fingers twist inside hers, wrapping around her hand and holding on. His grip is bruising, it hurts, but she knows him well enough to understand that he's almost unconsciously anchoring himself right now – and he's anchoring himself to her. It doesn't matter in the moment whether he realizes this or not – all that matters is that he's doing it.

It's the first tiny spark of hope he's given to her – and she's probably reading way too much into it – but she can't help rejoicing in it for a small moment.

Castle opens his eyes and lets go of her hand, he pushes past her as he exits the bed – bee-lining for his daughter who he catches up in his strong arms. A pair of well worn plaid pajama bottoms sits low on his hips and Kate just watches the muscles moving under his skin – mesmerized.

Alexis sobs onto his chest and Kate waits anxiously, torn between wanting to give them a moment to comfort each other and wanting to get them out of here so that they can get to Martha's side and figure out what comes next. Her cop senses kick in, thankfully and the brunette detective forces herself to take charge.

"We should go," she says decisively.

Castle's eyes dart to hers, his reply is low, weary, and broken. "I've got this, Kate. You can leave now."

_Like hell she will._

And she's about to start that fight she'd been preparing for when Alexis beats her to it. The writer's daughter pushes out of her father's embrace and wipes at the wetness on her face with frustrated hands.

"I want Kate to come with us, Dad," she tells him firmly.

Castle looks at his daughter stunned, "Why?" he breathes.

Alexis swallows looking suddenly unsure before she straightens her spine, "I think Grams would appreciate Kate being there. And I know I would."

Her father frowns, "Alexis-"

The red-head interrupts, "P_lease_, Dad." It's both a plea and a request to not be questioned further, at least not now. Kate hears this in her step-daughters tone as clear as day, the question is – does Castle?

Kate watches with her breath held as father and daughter stare each other down. Castle is clearly confused as all hell as to why Alexis, of all people, would suddenly want his estranged wife with them. Hell Kate is still a little confused, but she'll take any reason to stay at this point, any reason at all for being allowed to help him through this. She has to be here for him now, she just has to. She's already failed to help him with _so _much.

"We really should go, Castle," she says again, with all the confidence that she can muster while she paints her face with a look that she hopes brooks no argument.

"Go where? Exactly?" he asks.

Kate looks to Alexis.

"New Jersey. Grams was airlifted to a hospital in New Jersey."

The writer stares for a long moment at the floor, before he turns to leave the room. "I'll go and get dressed," he says as he heads out. "I'll meet you both at the car," he adds before he almost sprints for the stairs.

Kate heaves a small sigh of relief that he's letting her go with them. It might not be much, but right now anything is a start.

* * *

"Do you understand what I'm telling you Mr. Castle?" Martha's surgeon has blood on the hem of his scrubs and Kate can't stop staring at it, nor can she stop the shivers from racing up and down her spine.

_Oh, Martha. Please, Martha – don't leave him._.

Kate looks over at her husband as he nods in response to the question, but his blue eyes are somewhat vacant and Kate knows that what the man is telling Rick is just not sinking in. The cop pushes past her misgivings, her feelings of wanting to be here and hating that he doesn't really want her to be here, and she offers the surgeon her hand to shake.

"I understand," she assures him, quietly, before she tilts her head towards a pale and trembling Alexis, "As does his daughter. We'll fill him in when he's ready."

The surgeon – Dr. Elijah Browne – assesses her astutely for a moment before he smiles faintly.

"Mrs. Castle," he replies, "I'm sorry I don't have better news. The bleed into her brain was bad one and until she wakes up, if she wakes up - we won't know the extent of the stroke that she's suffered. I just need you all to be prepared for the fact that it is bad one. She's stable, but I'm afraid it would be imprudent of me to promise you that she can make a full recovery."

Kate bites on her lip to hold in a sob, it's just impossible for her to imagine Martha Rodgers as anything less than vibrant, loud and in-control. She grasps the doctor's elbow and tugs him slightly away from Castle's side, motioning to Alexis to remain in her seat beside him.

"What can you tell me about the bullet?" she asks, tugging her shield out of her jacket pocket. "It's not my jurisdiction, but the Hamptons' Chief of Police is a family friend, I assure you he'll keep me appraised of all the details of the investigation."

Dr. Browne shrugs.

"Nothing really, I didn't have to recover anything as the bullet glanced off her temporal plate and didn't penetrate into the skull, although it did cause a large skull fracture. I'm guessing the bullet was most likely a small caliber because of this, but that's merely my opinion. I'd also say she was most likely moving, probably ducking at the time. Her companion died at the scene, shot through the heart, you'd need to speak to the coroner for the details since we never treated him here."

Kate nods, fights back the images her brain can so easily call to mind.

'Thank you," she says softly. She's turning away when Dr. Browne stops her.

"You can see her shortly," he says. "Once she's been transferred to the ICU from post-op. Although I must warn you – her appearance may shock you. The stroke has affected the nerves on her left side quite dramatically and her face is uncontrolled on that half because of it. You might want to warn your daughter especially Mrs. Castle, if she knows what to expect before she sees her grandmother it will be less upsetting."

Kate feels herself blanch in horror, before she asks, "What else should we expect?"

"She's paralyzed on her left side – that much is already obvious to us, so she's going to be dealing with severe mobility issues. Apart from that it's hard to say. I would expect her to experience difficulty speaking as well as moving, and it's also possible that she may not be able to understand language at all. It's called aphasia, Mrs. Castle. And it could be as simple as word confusion and difficulty naming things, or it could mean the complete inability to communicate. As I said before – until she wakes up there is no way to know the extent of what you'll be dealing with. With luck, she may not have this problem, but my experience with similar hemorrhagic strokes leads me to believe that we should anticipate at least some degree of this."

The news renders the cop momentarily speechless.

"But, she's an actress," she whispers brokenly.

Dr. Browne looks grave. "I'm so very sorry."

* * *

Kate was afraid that between herself and Alexis they'd have to physically steer Castle up to the ICU ward when word comes through that Martha has been moved there. But the moment the words have left the male nurse's mouth, Rick is practically sprinting from the room and they have to haul their own asses to keep up with him.

In the elevator to the correct floor, the writer is practically bouncing in place. He hits the room where she is at a run, Kate and Alexis hurry after him and find him next to Martha's bed on his knees, as if he just collapsed there. The sight causes Alexis to seek shelter in her step-mother's arms immediately, and Kate fights back her own sense of despair as she feels the girl's gasping heaves against her neck. She buries what she hopes is a soothing hand in the younger woman's hair, stroking through it slowly.

Castle is silent as he reaches out to take one of his mother's small hands in his, but Kate can feel it all overwhelming him when he buries his head on the bed and all she can do is watch when his strong shoulders begin to shake. She tightens her hold on Alexis then, murmurs useless words of comfort against her ear.

She doesn't know how long they remain like this; but it feels like hours before she feels Alexis begin to pull away.

"I'm going to call her school," she whispers. "Classes are over for the summer but I think they need to know."

Kate nods. "What ever you want to do," she answers quietly.

Alexis looks over at her father, still hunched over by her Gram's bed.

"Stay with him."

"I won't leave."

The door to the room opens and re-closes with a soft snick and Kate wavers on her feet, caught up in maelstrom of conflicting feelings and without a clue what to do. In the end, she just goes over to him, drawn like a magnet to his presence before she reaches out a shaky hand that hangs for a terminally long moment of indecision in the air. Eventually she musters the courage to take the risk, and she cards her fingers oh so gently through his hair.

He doesn't shake her off, but the act of touching him like this seems to remind him that she's there. He raises his head and when his tortured eyes meet hers it knocks the wind completely out of Kate because of what she can see there.

Want. Powerful, all-consuming, overwhelming want – for her. Want that she knows he'd hide if he could, and may not even realize is showing.

"Kate," he whimpers, "My mom, Kate."

Tears rise up in her eyes and slip silently down her cheeks and she shifts her fingers from his hair until they cup the side of his face.

"I know," she whispers. Everything Dr. Browne has warned her about goes through her head, all the complications they've possibly got to face. She drops to her own knees beside him, risks resting her forehead against his. She's waiting for him to pull away but he doesn't, he just whimpers again, his words desperately clear.

"_My mom_."

She tugs him into her arms then, a small part of her still waiting for him to throw her off, the remainder knowing without a doubt that Alexis is right, and that he needs her here – needs her to find the strength that he can feed off.

"I'm here," she whispers into his neck, it's both promise and plea. "I'm here, Rick."


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N:. I'm afraid it's a group thank you for all your amazing reviews again - I've been so crazy busy (lame excuses, but true) that I struggled even getting any writing done.  
**

* * *

**Chapter Nine:** You light the road for me.

* * *

She won't leave him alone.

It's the dead of night again and she's in two day old clothes now, sleeping curled up like a child on a bench seat outside his mother's ICU room, and she won't leave him alone.

He's not sure what he's supposed to do with that.

Castle leans against the door jam and eyes Kate's sleeping form for the second time in two days, and he finds himself more conflicted about his feelings now than he was the night before.

Then he was just _so_ angry, and he was fearful, and couldn't believe she was trying to mess up his hard-won and very fragile peace, and yet tonight he's uncomfortably grateful she didn't listen to him.

He's been uncomfortably grateful for it all damn day. Where he couldn't get Alexis to leave and go home for the night, Kate managed it with a few hushed words and what looked like gentle pleading.

But when he told her she should leave, that he was okay on his own and he practically walked her backwards out of his mother's ICU room, she just calmly sat herself out here.

And out here she stubbornly remained.

The writer studies the sharp angles of his wife's cheekbones and the crescents of her dark lashes as they fall across her pale cheeks, and this time it's more than just her undeniable beauty that touches him. This time something reawakens in him that he can't seem to control, something he doesn't want to believe is still there. He's terrified, in all honesty right now, and not just about his mother's future. He's terrified that his wife possesses some magic pass to the walls he's built to keep her out and that she's finding a way to slip back inside. It's why he's wanted her to go away from the moment she walked back into his life yesterday, but Kate's stubborn. She always was _so _stubborn, and she just won't leave him alone.

And then there's the other truth he's dealing with, the unknown nature of the condition his mother is in. He heard the doctor last night. He might not have wanted to absorb the words, but his brain filed all the details away regardless. And the end result of that is that he fully understands that it's his mother's whole personality, her very essence that is hanging in the balance here. A situation every bit as scary as letting Kate remain here even when it seems he can't help but feel relieved in some intangible way that she is. He knows, he just knows that she'll be what keeps this latest catastrophe from swallowing him up. He knows that she'll ask the questions he can't bring himself to ask, that she'll find the silver lining for him when he cannot.

He doesn't _want_ to know this. Doesn't _want _to admit that it's the truth, because he doesn't _want_ to lean on her or rely on her in any way ever again. These are risks that he's already decided are too large for his damaged heart to take and yet . . .

He sighs wearily; maybe it's just a no-win scenario that's he's stuck in here.

Castle closes his eyes and holds his breath, and in the darkness behind his closed lids he lets the silence of the early morning hour focus him. He feels the familiar heavy drag, the immense weight of all the currents that have seemed so close to drowning him this last year, and then he lets all of this scary new reality pull at him.

And he sees the truth.

He sees and then he accepts that what he _wants _and what he _needs_ right now appear to be two _very _different things.

Because while what he wants is for Kate to go, so that he can go back to rebuilding the fragile foundations of his life again, what he _needs_ is for her to be here, for her to make some sense of all this for him.

What he needs is that fierce courage of hers that he remembers, that confident take-charge, take no prisoners way that he fell in love with. He needs 'Kate Beckett' – her soft voice and her grounding touch and that iron will that's just unbending – even when it's no longer a strength and works against her, or him. He's almost craving now the light and the pull of her that makes _him _stronger, better – that makes _him_ fearless and forces him to be more. She'll force him through this – she just won't allow him to give up.

The writer opens his eyes and looks back at her sleeping form again, and this time the ring shining on her left hand doesn't mock him, so much as remind him that something real, something apart from all they've lost still binds them - even now.

Something else occurs to him then as he unconsciously steps closer to her side, leaving the physical support of the door jam behind him. Yesterday when she surprised him all he saw was that she'd come back right at the moment he could finally let her go. Now he can't help but consider that just maybe Kate's been fighting all along to come back from where she's been this last year. That perhaps she just couldn't see, before now, how her actions made things so much worse for him.

He still can't excuse those actions, or what they've done not just to him but to his daughter, and his mother. Nor can he forget how that absolute silence between them felt like she was blaming him for Jack's death. That her absence was her seeking to punish him (much like when she flung Alexis continually in his face), no he can't excuse, but maybe he can truly accept now that it was all just grief - grief that buried her so deeply that it literally stole her away from him.

_Until now_. His heart whispers to his brain softly. Whispers he's not ready to hear.

Castle swallows heavily and let's his gaze rest on her sleeping face again and something inside, something that's been wound tight with fear eases slightly. He recalls his conversation with the grieving father 'Pete' from the day before, and how he'd told Pete that he didn't resent Kate for her actions, that he still ached for her.

It was true yesterday when he said it, wasn't it?

He's spent the moments since she surprised him believing other wise but maybe that's the just the anger talking? And maybe the anger is just an emotional smokescreen.

_It was true._

And that leaves him here – a little dazed and a lot confused and realizing that what happened after Jack's death aside, Kate is strong under pressure and great in a crisis, and that there is no-one he's ever been more grateful to have at his side. Though he still can't comprehend anything more than that with her – her partnership in this, her support, maybe even her friendship, these are things that he can accept.

And that makes what's coming, whatever it is – easier.

With that thought in his mind the writer makes his way back inside his mother's ICU room and sits back down in the uncomfortable plastic chair that he'd been occupying. He reaches out and once more takes possession of his mother's slender hand, seeking the reassuring thump of the steady pulse at the base of her wrist. Her skin is warm but feels suddenly so fragile and paper thin, and as he studies the veins and the faint age spots it hits him as it never has before now that his mother is getting older. And that makes him wonder how her age is going to factor into her recovery from this.

God, he just prays that she can recover from this. She has to recover from this.

Tears prick his eyes but he won't yield to them, instead forcing himself to look at her face; at the slackness on her left side that is incredibly jarring. It alters her, it makes her look like someone other than his mother and his fingers tighten around hers unconsciously. Her head is swathed in gauze but he knows from her surgeon that they had to shave her hair away in order to operate and it kills him knowing how much his very image conscious mother is going to hate that. She's going to hate all of this. The hospital, the injury – he can't think of much worse than what she's going to be facing, but what terrifies him the most is the possibility that she'll be so altered he won't recognize her flamboyant personality in anything she can still do.

She might wake up and not be able to understand what's being said to her. She might not be able to talk, or read, or communicate at all. He can't imagine it. Despite all his skill with words and stories, character, motivation – he just can't imagine his mother any way other than how she's always been.

He can't bear the thought of there being such a change.

For all she drives him crazy sometimes she's still been the rock of his existence. She's been the constant, the source of love. It's only now as he sees her lying there, looking like his mother - but not, that he finally feels just how the loss of a mother can be so devastating.

Because whatever she's going to be dealing with, however different she might be – he'll deal with anything, _anything_ – just as long she's still here, because there's no way he's ready to let his mother go.

So he keeps his eyes on her face, making himself come to peace with it, until his lids finally grow so heavy he can't keep them open a moment longer and his eyes fall closed. Castle slips into dreams of his childhood where his mother is young and strong and whole again, so very beautiful, lively, vivacious – and the entirety of his world.

* * *

Kate wakes to her phone vibrating in her pocket and the caller ID 'John Brady'. She picks up immediately, squashing a wave of guilt as she does so because she hasn't spoken to the Chief in over a year – but that doesn't matter right now.

"John. Hi," she says.

The unassuming Chief of the Hamptons' Police starts rambling,

"Kate, I'm just . . . I'm just calling to check on Rick's mother, and of course to let you know that I won't stop, I won't stop until I find out who did this to her. Um, and I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry Kate, I'm so sorry that this happened, I mean this stuff never happens here, you know this stuff never happens here and I just-"

"John-" Kate breaks into the torrent of words that are tripping over themselves as they come out his mouth. "This isn't your fault and I know that you're going to do everything necessary to find the person responsible for hurting Martha. And if you need any assistance I can offer you the best of the 12th's Homicide division. You just say the word Chief and we'll jump in and assist you – as unofficially as you like."

She doesn't mention that she hasn't even informed her partners yet, she doesn't have to. Espo and Ryan are crazy about her mother-in-law; they'll be chomping at the bit to be all over this.

Kate can hear the Chief breathing easier on the other end of the line already. One murder case not-withstanding, the Chief is right, this stuff never happens in the Hamptons – it's of the reasons the police presence there is so damn small.

"Thanks," John replies, the gratitude heavy in his voice. He sounds exhausted as he continues, "Kate, your house is a mess and I've got a dead body waiting on the coroner and it just, well I'm in over my head actually. I'd be really grateful for some assistance, from your colleagues – not from you, Kate you just be there for your family. Be there for Rick and I promise you I can coordinate the rest."

For a fleeting moment his words bite into her like an accusation – _'you just be there for your family_' and she wants to snap at him that she's trying and she's sorry about the past, but then she realizes that isn't what he's getting at, he just doesn't want her to focus on such a deeply personal crime. Knows she couldn't possibly be objective about it. She hasn't seen the man since before Jack died and since he's assuming that she's with Rick and Martha, well it seems pretty cut and dried that Castle didn't share with their friend the details of their estrangement.

"I'll have Detectives Ryan and Esposito call you later today John, off the record of course and if you can fill them in on what you know – they'll give you some pointers on what avenues of investigation you might want to pursue."

The Chief's voice is warm and more relaxed when he replies,

"I remember them. Thanks, Kate. But tell me, please, how is Rick's mother doing? The scene was pretty awful when we were called there and I called the air ambulance – is she going to be alright?"

Kate sighs heavily into the phone, "It's too soon to say. She's alive and she's stable but she's suffered a very serious stroke because of the bullet fracturing her skull. Until she wakes up they can't tell us for sure what damage has been done or how well she can recover from it."

"Oh God, Kate – that's, that's so terrible. How's Rick coping?"

Kate swallows the lump as her vision swims with recent images of her husband's grief-stricken face. "He's pretty devastated right now; the last year has just been . . . "she trails off then, unable to complete the sentence.

The Chief's voice is equally shaky, "Yeah, I know. I heard about your son . . . and now this. It's so much and I know sorry is a really useless word right now, so just let the big guy know he can depend on me okay – I'm not too proud to ask for help since I need it and I'm more determined that you can imagine to see this through. I will find the people responsible for this."

Kate thanks him quickly before her voice deserts her, and she hangs up.

The brunette detective drags a hand through hair that is starting to feel decidedly unwashed, before she looks down at clothes that are now two days old. She needs to shower and she needs to change and yet she's terrified that if she leaves him now she won't be allowed to return. That he'll revert to shutting her out again.

Kate shakes her head, she can't leave him, she won't. She'll just have to have someone bring her a change of clothes here for now, and then she'll figure something out.

Wherever he goes – she goes now. That's just the way it is.

The cop pushes to her feet and enters Martha's room again relieved when she discovers Castle sleeping awkwardly in the chair. He wouldn't succumb last night, when she finally did – so Kate treads lightly as she makes her way once more to his side.

He's still holding his mother's hand though, a sight that earns just the faintest smile because his large strong hand dwarfs the reed-like slenderness of his mother's slight fingers. A smile that fades as the visual also serves to remind Kate of Martha's unknown state.

With no more than a soft rustle of clothing Kate moves to the free side of the bed and gently picks up Martha's other hand. She cradles it to her chest as she sits gently in the vacant chair there , almost dropping it like she's been caught doing something she shouldn't when his voice breaks over her.

"Thank you," he says quietly, and the gentleness in the tone pulls her eyes immediately to his face.

"For what?" she asks, genuinely not knowing even as she's trying feverishly to read the soft expression on his face. The hard look that colored their interaction the previous night is nowhere to be found, but neither is the raw want – the unraveling need that he displayed when they first got here.

"For staying, Kate."

He holds her gaze easily and that alone almost moves her to tears, because although his eyes are still guarded, at least she finally sees her husband in there.


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N: No time, just no time, and a chapter that just didn't want to come out even when I knew everything that needed to happen. Don't you hate that?**

* * *

**Chapter Ten: **Put your hand on the glass.

* * *

It's the wee hours and he's not actually with her when his mother finally does wake up.

* * *

Two further days have passed and although he's left before to shower and change and she's gone with him (they've left Alexis with her grandmother), he hasn't ever been gone for more than a couple of hours. Just enough time to return to the loft and freshen up, before he's accompanied her to her rented apartment and waited awkwardly on the couch (uncharacteristically not snooping), before he's rushed them both right back here.

For herself, she's just been grateful for both her Captain's understanding and Castle's continued acceptance of her determined plan to remain with him. But though she's managed to fall asleep each night on the bench outside Martha's room, she knows Castle has only slept for a handful of hours each day. He'll stubbornly stay awake until sheer exhaustion causes him to crash out finally in the chair that she's currently sitting in – but she's taking the watch tonight.

Things have remained pretty even between them, a truce she thinks, with Castle accepting of her presence and even appearing grateful for it at times. But it was the moment when she finally persuaded him to leave, to go home and to try and sleep properly for a while, that was the moment that Kate felt again that sense of softening within him. For another perfect moment, the man she married was standing before her once more - he was listening, he was hearing her, he was _seeing _her again.

He agreed to leave his mother in _her_ charge and that decision meant so very much to Kate. Knowing that she'd remain awake, that she'd sit there in his place had allowed him to go home. To take some real time for himself and just regroup a bit, she can't describe how immensely humbled she is by that. She's overwhelmed in fact, because she knows that he's extending her a measure of trust once more, that most precious of lost commodities. It feels huge to her. Much more vital and more important than the subtle unfreezing of his demeanor towards her, and more like some form of 'partnership' being tentatively offered by him once again.

Of course maybe she's just reading into it what she needs to see, because the detective knows her husband wasn't actually thinking it any sort of real possibility that his mother might regain consciousness without him being here, not with the extent of her stroke seemingly so severe. And the waiting has been really hard on them all - knowing that Martha waking up anytime soon seemed nothing more than an unlikely dream.

A dream that's apparently coming true though, because Martha shocks Kate by suddenly moving and although the movement itself it almost tiny, she's just been so very still, so completely out of it since the shooting that any voluntary movement is strikingly vivid in the dead of night. It has Kate up and out of her seat instantly, the urgent press of her shaking fingers on the call button so she can alert the attending medical staff at once.

And it's really not much actually, at least in terms of movement that is - just the clenching of Martha's right hand. Desperately frail looking fingers catching in the blue blanket covering her, gathering it up while her pale knuckles whiten still further before they release, and she repeats the process once again.

It's rhythmic though, and it feels deliberate – something of Martha behind it, Kate's convinced of that.

And so she jabs the call button forcefully again and leans a lot closer, wetting suddenly dry lips with the press of her tongue as she reaches into her pocket for her phone. Her thumb hovers over the screen a moment before she realizes how very little there is to tell him and so she pauses, stowing the phone back inside her jacket as she uneasily decides that she'll wait.

He could be, at least she truly hopes that he's sleeping. Regaining some strength as he finally let's his body do what it must to keep him going. So yes, she'll wait, that's surely the better decision she thinks, at least for now. At least until there is something more to say.

Martha's hand clenches and unclenches again, and Kate is jabbing at the call button in frustration for the third time when the door to the private room finally opens, and one of the ICU's night nurses appears.

"Mrs. Castle?" she asks.

Kate swallows, "It's her hand," she murmurs, pointing towards her mother-in-law just as Martha clenches her fingers once again.

The young nurse smiles and steps fully into the room; she eyes the array of machines surrounding her patient and nods once, seemingly pleased.

"She's showing signs that she's coming around. That's good Mrs. Castle. If she opens her eyes and seems at all lucid that would be a highly encouraging development."

Kate bites her lip. "So I should just stay with her then? You don't need to do anything to help her wake up?"

The nurse smiles gently and gives a soft shake of her head.

"With an injury like this it's more about keeping her sedated until her brain has recovered enough that it's safe to let her come back to us. Thankfully since they operated to relieve the pressure caused by the brain bleed she's stabilized nicely. Her blood pressure is holding steady, her heart rate and her oxygen stats all look really good. We can let her just come around in her own time now, and then we'll see how she's doing."

"You mean how bad the damage from the stroke really is?"

"Yes." The nurse gently answers, "Exactly." She squeezes Kate's shoulder before she says, "I know it's hard, but try to stay optimistic, Mrs. Castle. I have a feeling that this one is a lot tougher than she might at first appear."

Kate manages to smile at this assessment, she can't help it. "Oh she's a fighter," she agrees, a cascade of 'Martha' images and memories clear in her mind, "A real force of nature actually."

"I remember."

Kate's brow creases in confusion and the young nurse hurries to explain.

"Oh I saw her in a play once, many years ago when I was a child," she confesses. "She was really wonderful. I've never forgotten it."

Tears fill Kate's eyes immediately and the young woman looks immediately contrite.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you," she apologizes.

But the detective shakes her head. "Oh you didn't, really, you didn't. I'm just so scared for her and all the challenges she's going to have to face. And I'm more than scared that she won't be herself at all, and how my husband will . . ."

Kate's throat closes up around the words and she falls silent, unable to finish that thought out loud. She has to close her eyes against the pain in her chest, fighting to block it out, hold it back. She forces herself to breath deep and slow.

She feels the other woman squeeze her shoulder gently again, before she just rests her hand there in silent support until she's gathered herself.

"Faith and optimism, Mrs. Castle, don't write her off just yet," she whispers when Kate can look at her again.

Kate nods, "Yeah," she breathes.

The night nurse smiles, before she looks all the rooms' apparatus over one more time.

"If she wakes up fully, let her see you, reassure her that she's safe before you call us. If she remembers anything about the shooting she might come around in a state of fear and a familiar face is much better before she lays eyes on someone new – okay?"

She smiles once more as reassuringly as she can and then she leaves Kate alone with Martha again.

Kate watches Castle's mother carefully as the clenching of her right hand continues, finally she can't stand doing nothing a moment more and she stills Martha's hand with her own, tangling their fingers together and holding onto them tightly.

"Martha?" she says clearly, "Can you hear me? It's Kate."

There's a long moment as Kate holds her breath and then Martha's fingers squeeze with surprising strength onto Kate's grip.

The cop's heart literally skips a beat.

"Martha, you're safe. You're in the hospital," she says. "Can you open your eyes for me, Martha? Come on, I know you can. Open your eyes."

Martha doesn't comply, but she does squeeze Kate's hand again and it feels very deliberate to Kate, a direct response to her words. She's just about to encourage Martha again when she notices that the older woman's eyelids are fluttering, her right one far more clearly than her left – but that's definitely moving too.

"Come on, Martha," she pleads loudly. "You can do it. I know you can open your eyes for me."

Kate reaches out her free hand and gently palms the side of Martha's face, her thumb softly stroking the other woman's cheek. Pass after soft pass until finally there's a sliver of blue that becomes visible and Kate just rejoices, feels her face breaking open into a smile. She wants to move and to call Castle, but she's afraid to let go so she finds herself just talking instead.

"Hey there," she whispers softly. "Welcome back."

Martha's half-opened eyes drift closed and then re-open with much more determination behind the movement. Kate can tell her mother-in-law is struggling to focus her gaze, and she finds herself holding her breath – wondering if this is the moment everything changes and all the worst predictions come to the fore again.

It seems to take forever but its seconds really until Martha's gaze finds and holds onto Beckett's. One side of her mouth curves up just a little, and Kate immediately bursts into tears of relief, she buries her face against the bed until the rasp of Martha's voice calls to her, and Kate swallows hard, raising her face in wonder.

But it isn't words Martha's forming. Its just sounds and it's intelligible and the more of them that she makes the clearer it becomes that Martha is trying and failing to say something, and the failure is completely distressing her.

"It's okay," Kate hurries to tell her. "It's okay Martha. You're going to be okay."

Kate reaches for the call button and stabs at it hard, while the hand tangled up with Martha's keeps gripping on tight and Kate prays that the pressure of it's reassuring.

There's confusion and a clear plea in the actresses eyes now. She's there, Kate can see it, but she just can't seem to figure out how to form words. So until the medical staff gets here Kate concentrates on trying to figure out if Martha can at least understand them.

"Martha? Martha, just listen to me. Do you know who I am? Can you nod for me if you know who I am?"

Castle's mother manages a small tilt of her head and the same tiny lifting of the right corner of her mouth again.

Kate smiles back encouragingly, while she wonders whether she should try and explain to Martha what's happened, and why she's struggling. She debates in agony whether to ask if Martha remembers anything, but then she remembers who she's dealing with and how Martha always was one to cut right to the chase. She wouldn't want it any other way.

"You're going to be fine," she begins, figuring that it's much better to keep telling Martha that than telling her what her limitations might be. "And you're safe," she continues, before she asks, "Do you remember anything about what happened to you?"

The actress frowns – sort of – as it's only the right side of her face that really moves but the way her eyes shift and lose their focus it's obvious to Kate that she's trying desperately to remember. When she finally looks back at Kate, there is no answer in her eyes, just a confusion that's born out when she manages a small shake of her head and what looks like the barest shrug of her right shoulder.

Kate swallows hard, again. Suddenly it doesn't feel right that she's the one who's telling Martha anything, even as she can't bear the thought of Castle having to relive the nightmare if he explains everything. But Martha doesn't even seem surprised to find Kate here and that's really scary – isn't it? Because it raises all kinds of questions about just how much of what she should know Martha's lost here. How many of her memories are going to be missing?

Kate holds Martha's confused stare and battles a war of indecision, finally settling on holding off on telling her anything, or asking her anything else just yet. All that can matter really is that his mother is awake, and so Castle needs to know this. Right now getting hold of him and keeping his mother calm is all that Kate feels she has the right to do.

The detective tugs her phone from her pocket once again and this time there's no hesitation as she punches the call button. As the call goes through and she waits for him to answer, Kate just smiles at Martha, "I'm calling Rick," she explains to her. "So you just stay with me Martha. You just stay with me because your son is coming."


	11. Chapter 11

**A/N: I've done some research on both strokes and their repercussions. However I'm not a doctor, so if the medical stuff isn't as accurate as it should be I ask you to both forgive and indulge me. All that technical jargon was hard on my poor writer's brain and I waded through it as best as I could to come up with a plausible scenario.**

* * *

**Chapter Eleven: **All stops and in-betweens.

* * *

He's breathless when he arrives at the hospital, one look at his anxious face and Kate can tell that he's forgone the elevator and taken the stairs, most likely two at a time. She sidelines him at the door to his mother's room, willingly risking rejection when she holds onto him by his bicep, forcing him to delay entering. She takes a deep breath and slides her fingers down grasping onto his hand and holding it firmly within hers.

"They're assessing her," she hurries to explain. "We need to wait out here and let them finish. Her surgeon promised me he'd update us as soon as they're finished."

Castle looks down at her, then down at their hands and Kate wages a war between wanting to hold onto him and stepping back. She studies his face and when he tugs gently to free himself - his eyes meeting hers again, she reluctantly lets him go.

Her husband turns his back on her and wanders over to the bench outside Martha's room that she's taken to sleeping on. He drops his weight down onto it and slides his fingers through his hair mussing it unbearably. It's a habitual thing he only ever does when he's overwhelmingly frustrated.

He's silent for a long time although he doesn't seem to be angry with her. Still, since there's so much unresolved between them she can't honestly say she's getting an accurate read on him. All she knows is that once he was such an open book to her, and now he's become something of an enigma.

Her heart aches with the weight of it.

"I'm sorry, Rick," she says quietly in the end, and his eyes shoot to hers, panic flashing across his features as he clearly wonders immediately if there is more bad news that she's about to break to him. She looks at the floor to avoid his eyes. "I'm sorry," she says again, "I should have called you the moment she so much as stirred, and especially as I know you didn't expect her to wake up just yet. I mean none of us did. And I know you wanted to be here. It's just I wanted you to get some real rest. You needed to sleep so badly and it was just her fingers clenching – really it was just that, and then she opened her eyes. But I'm sorry, I'm so sorry I should just have called you." She's rambling, apologies and sincerity spilling out of her because the last thing she wants is any more resentment between them.

Castle doesn't immediately respond, she just hears him blowing out a frustrated sigh.

"Look at me, Kate," he demands at length. His voice is even and moderated, but firm. I takes everything in her to drag her eyes up from the floor to his face.

"I feel so much better having slept," he confesses. "And it's not like mother woke up alone or anything. You were there, Kate. She saw the face of someone she loves when she came around and that's all that really matters to me."

_Someone she loves? Oh . . ._

"But still-"

"No. No still," he says interrupting her. "Thank you, for staying with her. And thank you for forcing me to take a break. Because if you hadn't been here, Kate - if I hadn't had that option. I mean I couldn't ask Alexis because this latest trauma . . . "

He stops suddenly mid-sentence with a tight smile that masks a grimace, but she feels it like a slap in the face. All her failures this past year hang large in the air between them, deliberately left unspoken. The huge pit of all she's burdened him with alone yawning like the Grand Canyon again, even as he offers her up his genuine gratitude.

Eyes shining she holds his gaze, "I really am so very sorry for failing you," she whispers, and they both know she isn't talking about his mother here.

The regret in his face when he says, "I know," is huge. "But I can't tell you that its okay," he adds before he closes this avenue of conversation down by saying, "How long have they been in there anyway? I want to know what's going on."

Swallowing the sharp pierce of pain from his words, Kate pulls herself back into the here and now.

"Fifteen minutes maybe," she says, turning from him as discretely as she can for a brief moment as she wipes quickly at the moisture threatening to overflow her eyes. "Her surgeon did tell me it might take them a half hour or so," she adds before turning back.

Castle nods thoughtfully.

"Would you like some coffee then?" he asks.

It's a familiar olive branch. Bittersweet. And Kate grabs for it.

"I'd love some." She doesn't offer to go and get it, knowing full well that he's giving her a moment to herself as much as he's trying to offer her something of what they once were. At least as much as he's able.

He disappears without further comment, and the visual of his tall, broad-shouldered form walking away from her causes pangs that hurt unbearably. She sits and waits - her thoughts as ever these days both tortured and spiraling.

He's back before she notices the passage of any real length of time, the take-out coffee cup just appearing beneath her nose and distracting her from dwelling in melancholy. She looks up as she gratefully takes it from him with both hands, and this time when he smiles at her tightly there's both affection and nostalgia creeping warily onto his face.

She'll take it.

Twenty minutes later the coffee cups are empty, and Castle is pacing in ever-decreasing circles that end with him fisting his hands uselessly at his sides, and shooting murderous glances at the closed door of his mother's room.

"I'm sure if won't be much longer," Kate offers, the words falling on deaf ears as the door to Martha's ICU room suddenly swings wide.

"How is she?" Her husband practically accosts his mother's surgeon, stepping inside the doctors' personal space and looming over the much shorter man like some frightening deity.

"Why don't you take a seat Mr. Castle?" Dr. Browne says with a firm tone and an incline of his eyebrow that brooks no refusal.

The writer swallows heavily and does as he's bid, sinking down next to Kate and reaching for her hand without consciously thinking about it. Her slight fingers wrap surely around his and he feels it ground him, even as he berates himself. He doesn't want to keep sending her these mixed messages.

Then the words, "How bad is it?" are out his mouth before Dr. Browne even has the opportunity to speak.

"Actually, I think it's safe for me to tell you that it's better than I hoped." The surgeon begins. He takes a seat himself at the far end of the bench with them, leaning forward with a small smile that immediately eases some of the tightness in the author's chest.

"Your mother is both awake and lucid. She also doesn't appear to be having any trouble with understanding what's being said to her."

"But that's wonderful news." Castle gushes. Dr. Browne holds up a hand to forestall any further celebration.

"Yes. That is very good news, Mr. Castle," he agrees. "It's a wonderful start. But I have to set against that the fact that your mother cannot communicate."

Kate's fingers immediately tighten on his and Castle feels his jubilation sliding rapidly away.

"So you're saying she can't speak?" he asks, seeking clarification.

Dr. Brown nods. "She understands. She can respond to questions with a nod or slight shake of her head, but she's clearly sustained some damage to the Broca's area in the lower rear part of her frontal cortex. Basically the large bleed that we operated to stem, has resulted in compromised ability in two areas. The paralysis on her left side will most certainly improve; in time I'd expect her to fully recover her mobility although she may have some lingering weakness on that side. The language issue however is much more complicated I'm afraid. I'll need to do some better scans of that area, but I have to tell you there exists the possibility that the damage that's been caused there is permanent."

"So she'll never be able to talk?" The horror in her husband's tone is just gut-wrenching, and Kate finds herself leaning against him instantly, hoping that the feel of her body pressed against his is somewhat comforting. The pressure he's exerting on her hand is becoming painful, but she bears it willingly. Welcomes it even, these tiny, precious few moments when he actively seeks her. His head bows and she swears she can feel the grief pouring out of him.

Dr. Browne sighs, his face a perfect picture of both compassion and sincerity. "I'm not saying that. Everyone's brain is slightly different Mr. Castle. Frankly even with everything we now know about it, absolutes like that are surprisingly hard to come by. What I can tell you is that this part of her brain is mainly responsible for her ability to express herself, both in spoken and written forms. That's why her understanding of language remains intact while she just can't get her own thoughts out. Well at least, not right now."

_Wow._

"I just can't imagine how she's going to cope with this," Castle breathes in despair. "This feels like the worse thing that could happen to someone like her. Someone who does what she does, whose whole identity is so. . . _theatrical_."

Dr. Browne reaches out and places his hand on the writer's shoulder; he rests it there until the younger man manages to look at him.

"This is much better than I expected," he says gently. "I don't like to be a doomsayer when my patients are post-op and unconscious because sometimes – instances like this one Mr. Castle, they pleasantly surprise me. Your mother's head injury was severe, she was lucky even to make it to surgery. And I know right now it feels like she's been seriously compromised but the fact remains that she's clearly still with us. She's clearly still in there. Spoken language, written language –these aren't the only forms of communication. Looks, nods, gestures all tell tales of their own. Yes, she cannot for the moment find the words for what she wants; even though she'll recognize them when you give them to her. But neither is she so severely damaged that there is no hope of recovery. And she could have been - she so easily could have been."

"So we've just got to hope – that's what you're telling me isn't it?"

The neurosurgeon nods, "Always. There is always hope Mr. Castle. Your mother is awake, alive and stable. Everything will be a step forward from here."


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N: Urghhhh, finally. Still not 100% happy with the update but I can't look at it or fiddle with it anymore.**

* * *

**Chapter Twelve: **Sooner surrender.

* * *

She _was_ going to go to the Hamptons alone.

That was the plan; spare him anything but the essential details after she got the call from Esposito and Ryan that they'd broken the case for Chief Brady. It's another battle won, she guesses and he's been arrested, the man who did this terrible thing to Castle's mother.

She'd been consumed with the need to oversee it. An instant desire, a huge and unwavering pull to see with her own eyes (now that it's solved and all she'd be doing is looking the case over), an insatiable need to make sure all the details are nailed down so tight that not a lawyer in the world can shake it. And Kate feels it both as a duty to Martha as her daughter-in-law, as well as her responsibility as a cop; but more than all of that she feels like it's all that her husband will let her continue to do for him, now that his mother is slowly but steadily recovering.

Because things have changed again between then in the five days since Martha regained wakefulness, and while Castle's still been openly grateful to her for both her steady presence and her support, he's also decidedly retreated from her on a more personal, emotional level. And he hasn't touched her since that day either.

Not casually, not even accidentally.

Not once.

And when she's caught his eye at certain moments and she's been witness to the struggle in them, it's become immediately apparent that he's very aware of it also. That it's his choice to steadfastly avoid any further physical interaction with her. A choice not made without some anguish on his part but mostly made very calmly, very deliberately.

And worse, made very much with a purpose.

He's recreating a defined distance between them and then maintaining it like a dam, filtering oh so carefully everything that he allows through it, and it hurts. There's a festering, ulcerated ache now within her because of it, adding to the pile of her fears and self-loathing.

She understands.

At least Kate keeps telling herself that she does. But the back-pedaling means she's somewhat at a loss now when it comes to how she's going to navigate through this to the outcome she needs. And she's growing increasingly worried about the conversation that she strongly suspects Castle keeps trying to start with her - the divorce.

He's been subtle. Hell, he's been gentle, magnanimous even. But she's convinced he keeps on trying to steer her into a conversation about it with the increasingly numerous mentions about him needing to sell the loft, but how he's now having to re-think his original plan to just spend more of his time in the Hamptons from now on. How he thinks that maybe it would be better if he just sold both of the homes because of the terrible weight of their memories, and how Connecticut seems like it might really suit him in regards to a place for a fresh start. He'll look at her then, waiting for an opening, or a reaction, and she's found herself ducking her head and just nodding, before she scrambles quickly to come up with a clever change of topic.

So far he's let her get away with it. Nothing more than a soft sigh and a creeping darkness in his eyes to tell her that he knows she's stalling him.

He hasn't mentioned Jack again though. Or the now imminent anniversary of his loss that is gathering on the horizon and coming for them both like a perfect storm; terrifying in its raw power now that it's just mere days away.

But then she hasn't brought it up either, and she hates that. Hates that she's become so very terrified of talking now to the man that she married for fear of where that conversation will ultimately take them. Wonders where exactly her commitment to coming back, to explanations and understanding, her determination to keep trying to be open enough to fix all of this have gone? It's not like she has him back – not in any real capacity. All she's really gained since she walked back into Castle's world is his ability to be in the same room with her once again, and nothing more than that.

And things can't go on like this; this is a holding pattern only. She cannot shake the feeling that Castle's simply resigned to marking time right now, as he waits to see what she'll do on the anniversary of their child's death. That he's fully expecting her to simply up and vanish on him again as she did when it first happened, and he's just tolerating the current stagnant status-quo and her continued avoidance of the topic of divorce until that occurs.

She's got no right to be affronted by that thought, yet it still stings regardless that he's maintaining his distance so very diligently because he's holding onto nothing but very low expectations of her.

The thing is - the now looming date that marks the place where both their lives unraveled is really beginning to terrify her. Kate can already feel tiny parts of her psyche fracturing again, and her instinctual modus operandi 'run and hide' whispering to her in every quiet moment. All she can do is fight it, and so she is. She's fighting it harder than she ever has before because she knows _everything_ hinges on her proving to Castle that he's wrong about this – about her. That she's _finally _learned from all her past mistakes this time and she's really changed. Permanently changed because their son's death has taught her never to waste a moment you can grab with those you love, and that's how she wants to honor him. Castle can't be expected to demonstrate faith in her, can't be expected to allow her into his life again until she accomplishes this, now can he? So every shred of hope she has that remains is hanging on her finally being there for him on _that _day. On being whatever it is that he needs her to be, be it wife, friend, partner or lover. This is her only avenue if she's going to salvage anything of value between them beyond the most tentative of polite friendships.

And though she values his friendship, treasures it even, there is no way Kate can see that she can survive the rest of her life if it's devoid of his love. His love is everything to her now; it's the only desire she has for life that remains.

Everything is spilling through her head as she starts her car, her mind set on making sure the case against Martha's attacker is airtight and staying away only as long as she needs to – but then the passenger door to her cruiser opens before she can change the gear into drive and she's thrown for a loop as her husband climbs into the vehicle with her.

She stares at him completely startled; his face is like a thundercloud, lips thin and jaw unyielding, a determination in his eyes that chills her.

"I'm coming with you." It's a statement said as he turns his eyes to the front and buckles his seat-belt almost angrily.

Kate's about to ask him if he even knows where she's going but the twitching muscle in his neck says he's already aware, and though she'd planned to spare him all of this she sees suddenly that he desperately needs every tiny detail.

'_Just like you would' _

_S_he mentally rebukes herself.

Kate swallows, debating for a moment before she just nods at him and simply puts the cruiser into reverse, backing it out of the parking space and exiting the hospital's parkade. They make it out of the city and onto the freeway before either of them speaks again.

"So who is he?" Castle finally asks, twisting his torso in the seat in a manner than makes it appear he's about to start interrogating her. His questions then come thick and fast.

"This . . . piece of shit that shot my mother, did he target my home deliberately or was it random? Did it have something to do with the man my mother was seeing? Was he married or something? Have there been any other home-invasions in the area? Tell me the truth, Kate . . ." Then he stops suddenly, biting on his lower lip so hard he draws blood.

"What?" she prompts. "Tell you the truth about what, Castle?"

His eyes drop to the badge currently sitting on her hip, she hasn't worn it since this all began but she pulled it out and clipped it on the moment she decided to head out to the Hamptons. He seems to study the shiny object with fascination until his eyes suddenly land back on hers again and there's a heavy burden of guilt in them.

The cop arches her eyebrow but waits for him to spit it out.

"Am I responsible for this?"

She wants to weep from the gravity in his low voice alone.

"No," she answers quickly. "And why on earth would you even think that, Rick?"

He sighs heavily, seems to debate whether to say what's on his mind but then he spits it out.

"Did he come to my house and target my mother because of me, Kate? Because of something I did – or didn't do for that matter?"

She wants to reach out her hand but since he's been so obviously guarded about his space she forces the urge down deep and settles for tightening her grip on the steering wheel until her knuckles are white from it instead.

"He knew your mother, but he didn't actually know you, Castle, although he knew _of you, _obviously. This isn't your fault in any way; it isn't your mother's fault either. The only thing that made her a target was your wealth, Castle. And that is absolutely not a justification or something that can be blamed on anyone. You earned your success, Rick and all the trappings of it. You can't blame yourself for what you have or the fact it makes you a target."

"Wealth?"

Kate sighs, "The man they've arrested was a student of your mothers – a more mature student than most of hers are but apparently one who had to quit the school because he could no longer afford the tuition. He thought Martha should have offered him a scholarship but when he didn't meet any of the criteria for one he decided to steal from _you_ in order to pay for it. If it's any comfort he wasn't expecting anyone to be at the house – at least that's what he's claiming to Chief Brady. He thought the lights on inside were purely for security."

Castle looks stony. His eyes drifting across the passing scenery as he nods slowly, clearly mulling everything he's learned over.

"She wasn't supposed to be there, but she changed her plans at the last minute." Sighing heavily he adds, "Why did he shoot them? I mean what kind of threat were two unarmed seniors anyway?"

Kate's not sure if he's actually asking her a question with the last part or just wondering out-loud. She knows Castle's seen enough pointless violence as her work partner not to even ask that, but regardless she has an answer for him anyway. "Your mother recognized him, Castle. He didn't want to end up in jail."

"Oh."

With his face turned away from her now, Kate can't get a read on what he's feeling so she offers up her own agenda instead.

"You really, really don't have to do this, Rick. I'll make sure the Chief has this all nailed down tight for you. This man, I promise you he's going to pay for what he did."

Her husband's eyes soften noticeably as he looks her way again, and she's overcome with the need to touch him – space be damned. Her right hand is off the wheel and reaching for his before she can consciously stop it. She sees him almost flinch when he registers her intent but she can't do anything about it. She grabs his hand, lacing their fingers intimately and the atmosphere between them charges in an instant. His skin is hot against her, the twining of their digits so reminiscent of when they used to make love.

"Let me do this for you," she pleads. Her heart is pounding now, the urge to pull the car over and bury herself in his arms insanely strong.

He stares at her mutely for a moment, his pupil's dilated and an unreadable expression in his eyes before he shakes his head and softly extricates his hand from hers, the charged atmosphere immediately turning sad and somber as he turns his head away.

"Let's just go and see the Chief, Kate. I appreciate what you're trying to do but it's my family, my life. It's my responsibility, not yours."

"I'm your wife," the words are out before she can think to filter them or ponder where that declaration could lead. Castle's shoulders tense and she wonders if this is where he starts flinging her failures in that regard back at her again, but the silence just stretches for a long moment as Kate holds her breath, and in the end he says nothing more than,

"I'm tired, Kate. I think I should try and take a nap. Wake me when we get there."


	13. Chapter 13

**A/N: If I didn't get to thanking you individually for your kind review last chapter – thank you. Your kind words as ever mean the world to me.**

* * *

**Chapter Thirteen: **Can't dream, no dream.

* * *

Castle is totally faking being asleep.

He's not proud of it. Actually he hates himself just a little bit for both the subterfuge and the weakness of character he feels is behind it, but he's still doing it anyway. Hiding from Kate for the duration of the trip to the Hamptons in an effort to reinforce the emotional walls he's back to using against her. Because the inconvenient truth of the matter is that he hasn't completely got a handle on himself right now, and being around Kate yet apart from her is getting harder and harder to manage.

He'd thought perhaps he could accept her friendship, could get to a place where that might be possible for them. And at the very least; her steadfast partnership has certainly gotten him through this ordeal with his mother this far, and he's so thankful for it.

Her being around has helped alleviate some of the strain from him, from Alexis, and it's clearly cheered his mother.

But there is no way that he and Kate can be friends.

Because it's become very obvious to Castle in the last few days that they're walking on a tightrope that's begun to sway and a spectacular fall for both of them might be only moments away. And so while he's outwardly been still, distant and somewhat silent with her, inside he's felt everything, all of his protective armor beginning to give way.

So this is clearly the dumbest thing he could have done right now isn't it?

What moment of rash madness possessed him to get into this car with her?

His defenses are weakening, his emotional reserves are beyond poor, and it would have been a far smarter decision to just let Kate head to the Hamptons alone. It's not as if he can't trust her with his mother's case, he doesn't have doubts she _will_ make sure Chief Brady hasn't and doesn't put a foot wrong. He should be letting her handle it – shouldn't he?

Isn't he just tempting fate like an idiot this way?

Allowing time alone with his wife when he's so very unsteady can't possibly be a good thing right now because Castle's sure, completely certain actually that she's merely a couple of days away from abandoning him once again. Not that Kate's said anything, or done anything that he could fairly or objectively call an indicator – the every opposite in fact because she's been staunch and steady. She's been his rock.

Yet he feels it regardless.

There is an inexplicable, innate sense of her that birthed in him through the years of their partnership and it tells him somehow, tells him that there is a tension rising in her, a black and evil panic that's making its claws known. So while her actions have remained solid and supportive and pleading with him for some small forgiveness, all he's truly able to hear are the insidious whispers of her old habits that are tugging her away. Urging her to flee and barricade both her heart and her physical self. To wallow in denials against all that time's march forward is about to bring.

He knows those whispers are there inside her.

Just as he knows she'll eventually listen to them.

So he needs every shred of indifference and aloofness he can conjure, needs every brick in his walls strong because it's coming. The loss of her is coming as the 'date', the awful, dreadful, hated 'date' creeps ever closer and all his precious memories of that life they once lived and their tiny son become a sharp pierce of grief he just can't cast off again.

It had been better. Finally a little bit better but then with his mother, and then with Kate and then . . . oh it's been a year.

A whole, entire_, year._

And that's eight months longer than Jackson was even . . . here.

The pain that shoots throughout Castle with that thought shouldn't startle him. It should be an accustomed agony and it was, for so long it was but now Kate is next to him and it isn't again. Starting in his heart and radiating out its like shards of ice are ripping him to pieces from the inside out.

He shifts in the car seat and hopes it looks like he's unconsciously seeking a more comfortable position. His insides are suddenly knots, and the time that he has left until . . .

Just two days more.

_Oh, God._

Forty eight hours until what feels like an Armageddon approaching, and in the end he realizes that's exactly why he is here, in this car. Putting this fragile control to the test because if he had let her come out here alone, then that would mean he'd relied on her to take care of something for him.

That he'd treated her as his wife and not the woman who broke him – and that's unacceptable. So even if each moment he spends in Kate's company has become like he's waging a three way war between his head, his heart and his body he's just got to see it through.

Castle shifts again, turns his head to the window and only when his face is hidden does he let it contort into a grimace that writes his exhausted determination in every line.

His facts are these - his head is certain. It knows that she's bad for him, knows that the evidence is all in, and has been in for a year. Kate will vanish again in two days and there is nothing he could do to prevent it even if he wanted to. And if his heart _wavers, _calls him on that belief, and wants him to think otherwise_ – _so what. All that proves is that his heart doesn't know any other way to function. That it beats for her even as it cowers away from her, terrified of the power she wields over it still. Terrified its fragile peace will be torn away. His heart is weak for Kate, but his mind can win that war.

It's his body he's got to watch out for here.

It's his body he's fighting this very minute as he feigns this ridiculous need for sleep in the middle of the day as her scent is subtly wreathing all around him. The essence of her, the energy of her is alive in the air.

His own body has become his enemy here.

It's been shaken from a year long deprivation and now every soft breath she takes and he doesn't touch her is just torture.

The constancy of her presence in his life again has woken him up. Stirred to life a side of himself that he'd totally believed was dead and buried until he noticed that every moment she's in close proximity to him his pulse is elevated and his arms ache with emptiness. Fighting the magnetic pull of her is driving him steadily insane.

The fall of her hair, the angles of her cheekbones, the endless ocean he tries not to see in her eyes. Everything about her so familiar and so intoxicating, conjuring an avalanche of memories so vivid that he sees them play before him all the time. Sleeping, waking, even when she's talking to him – he sees her beneath him, above him. He can almost feel her against his skin and under his fingertips, his palms itching to touch her so badly that he doesn't dare to let himself touch her at all.

But he wants to.

And that want is a hungry beast now that's barely chained and constantly tormenting him. He isn't used to needing to restrain it, can scarcely remember back to the years when he was. From the moment they came together on the stormy night that she came for him he's never again had to leash this incessant desire, this fiery passion that Kate ignites in him.

From that night forward he learned to indulge it. Rejoice in it. Live it to the full. And unchained it not only lived it prospered. It became a wild and untamed thing that bound them both so tightly that at times it was all that either of them could see or feel – it was everything.

It created Jackson, and then it died with him.

Feels surreal and with the anniversary so close it feels so cruel that he has to fight _this_ battle once again.

Castle closes his eyes tighter and wishes he could will his awareness of her away. It doesn't help any and by the time she shakes him, presumably to let him know that they've arrived at their destination, he's buzzing and punchy and already worn out from it.

"Castle, we're here." He feels the car come to rest and then the scalding burn of her fingers wrapping around his upper arm to rouse him. He moves with speed, so fast it must be blatantly obvious to Kate that he was never napping. His fingers circle her wrist and tug the unwanted yet longed for connection away, and then he drops her arm like she's poisoned him, exiting the car in an ungraceful flurry of awkward limbs.

If he'd looked back he would have seen the hurt bloom, followed by an utter emptiness on her face, both banished quickly as his wife forces herself to gather up her wits and simply follow him.

* * *

"Rick! I wasn't expecting to see you?" Chief Brady's face is all fierce worry and apologies as he rises from behind his desk as the writer wanders in. Kate trails on his heels and the writer wonders for a second if the gulf between them is plain enough to see. Dismissing the thought as unimportant right now, he holds out his hand and plasters a small, token smile on his face. He likes John Brady, he always has.

"I needed to be here," he offers quietly in explanation. "I know that you've built your case Chief, and that you were expecting just to run it by Detective Beckett, but I'm sure you can understand why I need to have a hand in this. I won't take up much of your time and I'll happily leave you with Beckett if you like, but only after you walk me through it."

John Brady's eyes dart from Castle to Kate, a questioning eyebrow is all that conveys his confusion. Kate gives a small, apologetic shake of her head and casts her eyes down and so the Chief of the Hampton's police forces a quick recovery. He plasters over his confusion with a smile and then indicates that perhaps both Castle and Kate should take a seat.

Coffee is offered and refused and with the pleasantries out the way the Chief does as he's been bid. He walks Castle through every detail of the case against his mother's attacker, even the ones that are emotionally brutal.

Castle remains stoic and stony throughout, but within he's increasingly seething.

Kate's already given him the basics, the motive, the culprit. He knows the why and the who but when it's laid out in detail it's all so very pointless and so damn self-serving, and the man who is responsible is such a conniving loser that by the end the writer would almost be happy to exact the death sentence on him single handed.

The only facts that ease the writer's frustration are the man's confession and his steadfast conviction that he never broke into Castle's home with the intention to hurt anyone. It doesn't change the fact that he did, that he murdered an innocent person and almost killed another just to avoid a prison term for burglary. But it does help the writer to know that his mother wasn't actually targeted for harm.

He can't help but believe that this fact will make it easier to live with everything in the long run somehow; although he definitely isn't there yet, and at least he's satisfied that the man _is_ going to pay.

Which means he can move on to the other matter that's now asking for his attention, and it might even give him a 'Kate' reprieve.

"I want to see the house," he says suddenly.

Silence had fallen over the three of them once Chief Brady had completed his walk-through of the case, and Castle's pronouncement - though quietly made, is jarring.

"But, Castle-"Kate opens her mouth to protest but is silenced instantly by the power of the expression on her husband's face.

"You don't have to come with me, Kate," he says evenly. "The crime scene has been all cleaned up, you organized that for me, remember?"

Kate nods her head.

"I'm just saying that maybe it's too soon?' she offers tentatively. "The Chief has all his ducks in a row, maybe we should just head back to the city, Rick."

Castle shakes his head, his demeanor calm.

"Alexis is with my mother and she's stable. What I need is to see the house, to walk through it. You should go on back, Kate. I can easily take the train home from here; I'm not asking for you to accompany me there."

Kate thinks about it. She actually catches herself thinking about leaving him to it and taking a break from the strain that she's under but his expression troubles her. It isn't calm like his voice, and the darkness that she's sensing rising in him, his despondent commitment to warding off every effort she makes towards him is practically blazing in his eyes, although she doesn't think he's actually aware of it.

And then it hits it her. It's like a lightening bolt, a perfect moment of clarity. The real 'why' of his sudden burning need to go to their Hampton's home. And it has nothing to do with the case against his mother's shooter, or with seeing how things have been cleaned up in the aftermath, and everything to do with his need to say goodbye to it and make his peace with that. This is just another piece of evidence he's laid before her that he's letting their marriage go.

She panics.

"I'm coming," she says, stepping in towards him and blocking his way.

Castle's face is once more a neutral mask that betrays very little, the twitch in his fingers however is very telling. He'd really rather she didn't come with him, and suddenly that's exactly why she has to, because their Hampton's home is special.

If they were both to be honest and could lay the horror of Martha's shooting aside – then the house is full of nothing but their very happiest memories. Its full to bursting with all that was best and brightest and most untainted by their past failures with each other, Kate's even convinced that Jackson might have been conceived there. So if Castle wants to go because he thinks he can finally say goodbye to that, maybe if she goes with him it could be the one place she can begin to convince him that they've still got a chance to turn their relationship back around.

"I'm coming with you, Rick," she says again, determinedly stepping right inside his personal space. She sees his eyes widen, sees something flare in them that ignites hope low in her gut before he steps back and away.

Her husband shrugs, "Suit yourself, Kate," he says as if it's nothing, but she knows that it's _something_ and she follows.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen: **I need one more night.

* * *

The trip from the Hampton's police precinct to their upscale West Hampton's estate doesn't take more than fifteen minutes. It feels more like fifty - to both of them.

Castle's silent and withdrawn, his face turned away and his eyes stubbornly flitting from the passing ocean views to his lap and back again. He steadfastly doesn't glance in her direction, but at least he's not feigning sleep on her now, as she's pretty damn certain that he was while she drove them up here.

He's trying for unconcerned, unbothered, she thinks. But he's failing dismally and coming across as guarded and calculatedly cold instead. Her mouth tastes bitter with it, the fact that he's play-acting and still so unable to be himself around her.

But then she makes the turn onto their mile long driveway and Kate's thoughts are instantly pulled away from her husband's current state of mind and sent spiraling instead. She swallows heavily as she steers the cruiser closer to the house, forcing the sudden rampant nerves and nausea back down into her stomach. As their destination finally comes into view she realizes with unwavering certainty that she wasn't actually ready to come here.

Not ready in the slightest and its terrifying that that she didn't even know that until this very moment.

Her foot eases up on the gas pedal without her noticing and the car begins to slow far before it reaches the parking circle in front of the sprawling ocean-side mansion. The cop doesn't notice anything, all she can see are flashes. Vivid images scurrying across the landscape of her mind from the last time that she was here. The last time they were here together. Jackson barely a month old and strapped securely into his car seat beside her. Castle driving and bemoaning the lack of her presence in the front of the silver Mercedes while she focused instead on playing with the tiny perfect fingers of their son. Jack was all wide-eyed and staring at her, too young yet to smile but the concentration written somehow on his face gave the distinct impression he was trying to.

Kate sees it all again. She feels it all, again.

All of that perfect happiness.

Breathless and uncontainable. Everything that she'd never dared to dream that she could have and it was hers - _theirs_. A life she could never have imagined. A love unlike anything else she'd ever known - and a baby. A gorgeous, perfect miniature of the incredible man who fathered him – it was everything . . . Everything.

All gone now.

All of it long gone, and suddenly all the world is unraveling again as it did a year before, and the cruiser is starting to swerve even as it rolls to a stop still a hundred meters from their destination. She's not aware of any of it – nothing beyond the overwhelming cascade of feelings and images of how perfect life was the last time that she was here.

She wants to die.

In this moment, she just wants to crawl inside these beautiful memories for a moment, breathe them in, hoard it all to her heart for one final second and then just stop. Just stop living. Stop feeling, stop fighting, stop hurting. Just stop.

* * *

"KATE!"

The call of her name is sharp, loud. And she comes back out of it as Castle makes a grab for the steering wheel, keeping the cruiser from rolling onto the grass verge as it comes to rest.

She turns wide frightened eyes on him and Castle stares back. Confusion and fear dancing across his face as he wonders what's she's playing at? What's wrong with her?

"Kate?" he says again, softly this time. A thousand questions asked in his inflection only, he offers up nothing more.

Eyes filling she fights to be honest with him. Fights to share this with him instead of giving into the blind panic that's overtaking her and letting the loss – the terrible loss – steal her away. It's _their_ loss, their loss, and she knows if she gives into this instinctual impulse ever again all hope of him coming back to her _will _be gone.

"The last time . . . " She gets out.

Castle frowns, repeats it back to her as a prompt, "The last time?"

"The last time we were here – together." Her voice breaks, the image of tiny fingers inside hers carried in the heartbreak.

Her husband's eyes light with a sudden understanding and then dim with the burden.

"Yeah," he manages to croak out. "We were a family."

Kate nods and reaches blindly for him, desperate for the feeling of his reality, and their connection. She grabs onto his fingers and her eyes close as she ghosts her thumb across the back of his hand. Lets her focus be on the warmth and the real, solid feel of him. He's her reason to remain; he was and still is her only reason to remain. He is _why_ she's fought to come back from this terrible darkness that's engulfed her over this last year. It hasn't been easy for her, though she doesn't know how to make him understand this, not without it all sounding like excuses for behavior that shames her heart in its terrible selfishness now.

Behavior that calls to that same broken heart this very moment. Offering a way out where there is just blissful denial and everything is comfortably numb.

_But no, no Kate. Silly Kate.  
_

She can't let it beat her, not after all her work, has to let this all out now so that maybe Castle can begin to see how hard she _has _been fighting.

"You . . . For you," she gasps. The words are a struggle. Air is a struggle and then suddenly she's free of the seat-belt and conscious of him almost lifting her across the divide between the seats, and into the haven of his lap.

"Breathe, Kate," he murmurs against the top of her head and she realizes that she's burrowing against him. Cramming her head into the space beneath his chin so that her ear can seek out the strong rhythmic thumping of his heart within his broad chest. It races beneath her ear, picking up speed as she listens.

Her husband's arms wrap awkwardly around her and he seems unsure where to put his hands. That and his racing heart tell her just how difficult this is for him, but then he cradles her close even though she can tell he doesn't really want to.

"Just breathe," he whispers again, his low voice calm and infinitely comforting. "Deep and slow, Kate - you can do it."

Air rushes back into her lungs as if solely on his command, and she clings on hard to him, her fingers scrambling for purchase in his shirt as she fists the material between the digits desperately.

She lets the tears come.

* * *

_Oh God, Kate._

It feels, actually Castle doesn't know _what_ this feeling is that he currently feels as he holds his wife close in the narrow confines of the passenger seat of her vehicle. So much of her is in contact with so much of him, and this breakdown of hers is . . . unexpected.

The blind panic in her eyes, the memories that she was clearly reliving. He knows exactly what scene has swept over her. And it's unexpected only in that he's been thinking she'll flee because of the bad memories yet to rain down on them. Not the good ones.

Oh, God – not the good.

Everything, every moment that they shared here, all of it's just . . .

So very happy they were, and so much in love.

Heart in his throat, a storm of emotions swamps him and he doesn't realize it but he cradles her just as tightly now as Kate's holding onto him. There is no awkward awareness of it in the way he just reacts on instinct. His body seeking her closeness and his mind unable to counteract it - too occupied.

Its all clear as Kate sobs against his shirt, tiny murmurs of his name falling over and over from her lips, and the writer looks through the windscreen to the looming shape of the home beyond that they both love. The sprawling house is such a familiar sight, one he's always taken for granted because it's so long been a part of him. Maybe that's why he views it differently in this moment than she. For him there are so many more years of memories, so many more moments that his mind can associate with here.

But for Kate, her memories of this place are so much more compact, compartmentalized. Every one of them linked to him specifically. To how perfectly happy they had been within its walls, gifted after so many trials and tribulations with such a wonderful, full, extraordinary life.

Gifted with Jack, who was surely created in the huge bed that dominates the master suite – or maybe the soft rug that they love that lies before the fire? He doesn't know and it doesn't matter. They had it _all_ and her reaction to it, how she's reaching for him – it's so very different from how she so resolutely pushed him away.

There are no walls around her grief here. No barriers to the hopeless darkness of her loss – their loss – she isn't hiding or being stoic or any of the things she's previously done when caught in the throes of all the pain of this.

Instead she's physically seeking him, she's open and her eyes as she gasped for breath told him something Castle doesn't know how to believe is true, even though he saw it clearly written there.

Even though he heard it in her gasp of '_For you'_.

He's the only reason Kate's still living in the aftermath of Jack's death. The only reason she could even begin to try and make it through. He tugs her tighter still against him, grappling with this flash of understanding. Wonders if he can somehow absorb this? Reconcile it with how she's made him feel this past year as he struggled himself to hold his life together. He doesn't know, he can't answer it yet. He fears strongly that this is just a behavioral aberration from her, as the anniversary clock is ticking down.

But he holds her.

Holds her with feeling. Holds her as her husband would even if it is. He can't help it, because how does he deny now that he's the sole reason she lives.


	15. Chapter 15

**A/N: Thank you for the stunning reviews last chapter, forgive me for just saying that here and neglecting more personal responses due to time crunches in RL.**

**Chapter Fifteen: **If you don't love me . . .

* * *

Castle climbs the stairs to the house's upper level consumed by a familiar combination of anticipation and fear. An unknown road lies ahead of him once again and the thought is strange in the weirdest of ways - because who better than him knows only too well how life can change in the blink of eye?

And yet he'd kind of assumed for lack of better word, that his life was mapped out from here on in. He'd be a father to Alexis, his mother's son and for both Jackson and Kate he'd be in mourning - and that's it. That's how he'd understood life was destined to be. And yet the events that have conspired to bring him here this evening, his mother's stroke and Kate's homecoming . . .

He sighs heavily, because she's changed his landscape yet again hasn't she?

The writer reaches the top of the stairs and takes a moment to stare at the two full glasses in his hands and it all seems . . . too normal. The house has already been restored to order – there is nothing but a missing rug to tell him anything untoward recently happened here. He feels like he should be able to picture everything that occurred the night his mother was shot, by being downstairs where it happened. He feels like the place should seem different – violated somehow, but that isn't how it is. Being here isn't weird, and the fine red wine that he's holding it's just too normal - too bittersweet. The combination stirs up a maelstrom of memories inside him, dragging him down even as they suck him in, causing tightness in his chest that's genuinely painful. Castle closes his eyes as something like vertigo rushes over him and he sways unsteadily in place. The darkness behind his eyelids is helping but barely, and then her voice reaches him.

"Castle?"

The soft intonation of his name is followed swiftly by a firm grip on his right elbow, and the sensation of vertigo vanishes instantly - as if she's banished it.

"Rick? Are you okay?"

Castle nods, fighting for a long moment with his eyes but when he wins the battle and pries them open he's rewarded with such concern swimming in hers that he can't hold back his instinctive response to it. His face eases automatically into a small smile.

"Just . . . memories," he confesses quietly. "This place-"

"Oh, yeah," his wife responds. Relieving him of one of the wine glasses, she takes a large swallow as if to fortify herself before she adds, "I meant to thank you, Rick. For earlier, for what you did – back in the car," she explains.

Castle half shrugs as if it was nothing, except of course that it wasn't _nothing_ and they both know it, so a heavy silence almost immediately descends. The atmosphere between them seems alive somehow, it has weight and potential and though there is darkness to it each of them senses the possibility of dispelling that by speaking.

"Can we talk?" They ask suddenly and in unison and then they're grinning at each other and Castle's struck by a strange sense of _normality _once again.

It's weird. Things aren't normal, nothing about any of this is normal but he can no longer deny that something still in him, some part of who he used to be _longs_ to get there.

And that's new.

"It really hit you, didn't it? Coming back here I mean," he begins, and Kate nods. "But you weren't expecting it."

She shakes her head.

"Not at all, " she answers, stepping back before she turns and walks ahead of him down the long hallway, clearly heading for the bedroom that used to be theirs.

The sight moves him for a moment, and then he shakes it off and follows her. When he reaches the threshold of the room he stays there, leans against the doorframe for support and just waits – watching her.

Kate wanders slowly through the expansive space her eyes seeming to drink everything about it in – he recalls the first time he brought her here – the way she trailed her fingertips over everything was just the same.

She stops in front of the gas fire, crouching suddenly and when the flames spring to life around the large iron anchor, it doesn't matter that it's June and the room doesn't require the extra warmth, it just reminds them – it reminds them both of who they're supposed to be.

"Do you think it was here?" she asks him quietly, straightening up and turning eyes full to brimming with every conceivable emotion on him. It's not the clearest of questions but it doesn't have to be, he already knows exactly where her mind has taken her. Same place her lighting of the fire has taken him.

This is exactly where they made him.

He nods, his throat clogging with emotion, it makes his voice when he finds it gravelly and deep.

"It fits," he replies tilting his head as he's thinking about it. "I mean we'd planned to come out here for my birthday but then you were sick with the flu and then we caught a case, it was two weeks later before we managed to finally get away."

Kate drops her eyes to the plush rug at the foot of the bed, before she sinks down onto it, tucking her long legs beneath her as she stares into the flames. He watches her almost entranced, waits for his walls to go up, his anger to kick in, but instead he feels open – like maybe he's finally ready to _listen_.

"Can I sit with you?" he asks.

Wordlessly she nods at him, so Castle pushes off the doorframe and debating he bypasses the bed - which would put him above her, and settles on the other end of the rug instead.

"You don't have to ask," she says softly, smiling inwardly as she watches him fidget his way into a somewhat comfortable position, not always an easy task for someone with his large frame. "It's your house, Castle."

His head snaps up and he shakes it. "It's been ours for a long time." His gaze holds hers and Kate can't look away, she swallows, biting on her lip as it trembles and she debates but then decides to continue with what she was going to say.

"I think it was here," she says, breaking the tension. She strokes the plush pile on the rug, lets it caress the palm of her hand as she indulges in memories she's refused to let herself access this past year, especially the physical ones associated with this spot.

"I think my back hurt for three days."

He doesn't exactly smile at her, but the softness in his eyes is everything encouraging.

"I think you whined about it for five," she shoots back. "You can't tell me it wasn't worth it." She's trying for a joke, she's only talking about the sex even – but when his eyes darken, and his gaze becomes pointed in response she isn't wholly surprised.

"No, I can't," he admits. "I wouldn't take that night back, wouldn't give him up or wish him away even if I knew going in what would eventually happen, Kate. I'd still want Jack, even if it was only for a day."

The accusation in his words isn't lost on either of them, and Castle slaps himself mentally for letting his words just get away. He is ready to listen, he is. He softens his gaze again, takes a long sip of his wine and waits. The night she came home again to the loft he wouldn't let her get a word in edgewise, he doesn't mean to do that again here.

"Is that really what you think?" she asks brokenly and at length. "That I wished him away, that I walked out on you when you needed me the most because I wanted too?"

Castle sighs.

"I don't know _what _I think anymore, Kate. That's what I'm trying to say, truly. In the beginning, it all hurt too much to think at all. I mean you changed so quickly after he died. One minute it was a terrible waking nightmare but you were by my side, and the next it was like you hated me, like you blamed me for it even. You disappeared, Kate. And the woman in your place couldn't even _look _at me. I was forced into grieving _both_ of you – and I tried so hard to understand it. I tried _so_ hard. And I kept on trying, Kate, until I realized I was never going to start living again unless I stopped, accepted it, and let you go."

"I'm so sorry." It trips off her tongue almost by rout and she sees him open his mouth just as instinctively to dismiss it, so she holds her up her hand to waylay him.

"Wait," she pleads. "Please."

"I'm listening," he pleads back. And it is a plea. For the first time since she hijacked his life again by returning to it, Kate sees what she's been waiting for in his eyes. It burns there, vibrant, true - that familiar need for the story, for the truth of things, that innate desire that makes up the core of who Richard Castle truly is.

"I've never loved before you," she whispers.

He frowns, looks a little unbelieving. Opens his mouth to speak but then closes it again.

"Other than my parents I mean. My grandparents - and that's a completely different kind of love, Castle. You already know that after my mother was killed I walled an entire part of myself off. Never let anyone close, never took a risk. And then suddenly there was – you - and it was never my choice to love you, Castle. One day I woke up and it was just there. So big, so much bigger than anything I could have imagined. You scared me and I didn't want it every bit as much as I did want it, but regardless of wishes there you were. Every unacknowledged desire of my heart fulfilled. I fought it. You know I did. So long I wasted until I finally made a choice – a choice to just be with you, to pull the wall down and allow us to be. And I really thought that's what I'd done - pulled it down. That - or that maybe you were just on the inside of it. But what I'm trying so badly to explain is that I know now that isn't what actually happened, Castle. That wall, my wall, was still completely there, with all of its bricks intact. I'd just learned to walk through it."

Kate stops, she's shaking. She holds his quizzical gaze as steadily as she can, a fierce surge of love for him pouring through her from the quiet empathy shining in her husband's eyes. The line of his jaw is tight with tension though and she knows he's struggling to hear her out. That there is a cost he's bearing to lower his own guard again in order for him to give her this.

"I'm not really following, Kate." He confesses, and the confusion is clear in his voice. "I guess I can't see what any of that has to do with Jack's death?" He wonders aloud.

"Everything," she breathes.

_Everything._

"Castle, how I was after, everything that I allowed myself to do. It's only now, only after eight more months of therapy that I can unravel it myself. I can't exactly find the words except to say my wall is selfish, Castle - and unconscious, mainly reactionary most of the time. It's like a form of protection that only cares about me. It comes from fears, of cowardice, of failure, of hurt and inadequacy, and it clouds my mind, it turns a part of me off somehow. It's the darkness in my soul from all the past grief I never really allowed myself to deal with, even after I was shot. I got so far that first time I saw Dr. Burke. I came such a long way - I did, but all that meant was that I could find my way through it. I still hadn't learned how to not need it anymore – but I didn't know."

Holding his gaze with hers, Kate hopes how painfully honest she's being can be seen in her eyes. Castle has always been so good at that – at reading her even when she didn't want him to and she can only hope he still can. She's not sure what to call the look on his face, but it encourages her to go on, tells her that he's absorbing what she says.

"When we lost Jack . . . I never hated you, Castle. And I never blamed you. No matter what I said, no matter how I acted, in truth I blamed only myself; I hated only myself, and how completely I felt that I'd failed the both of you. I kept asking myself how I could have been sleeping while our baby slipped from the world. What kind of mother did that make me? You, you were the perfect parent, Castle. The one who'd already raised the perfect child. Don't you see? It had to be me? It had to be my fault. And I couldn't look at you because I saw him in your eyes, Rick. I saw his face, and he kept asking me why? Why Mommy? Why?"

She breaks off sobbing, the anguish bursting from her like she's vomiting it up.

Castle eyes are wide with pain, glassy with tears. He blinks to see her more clearly and the tears fall, they slide down his cheeks like warm rain.

"So. . . "He begins but his emotions are too jumbled and words can't form in any coherent order in his brain. All he knows is that he's staring at her like he's seeing her for the first time in a year. In a daze he lays his wine glass on the hearth of the fireplace and the flames in the grate speak to him. His immense love for her surges outwards like fire itself, propels him across the rug until she's just in his arms. She clings to him, wraps herself around him as if she can't bear for any part of her to be free of him.

She whispers the last of her confession into his chest.

"And the wall it just came rushing back. It locked me away from you, Castle. It buried me alive."


	16. Chapter 16

**A/N: So lame I am at getting to individual answers to reviews - I totally suck, I know. You all rock however, dear readers - your kind words, wonderful encouragement, tweets, re-tweets - you have amazed me, made me laugh, made me cry in the best ways - and I am grateful - truly.**

**Chapter Sixteen: **I let your words slip through my cracks.

* * *

Castle has no idea how much time passes until her sobs cease, but eventually Kate calms and then he feels her tense up a little within his embrace. Her tight clinging hold on him eases, and he doesn't know how he knows it - but he just gets this sense from her that she's feeling guilty now for the way she wrapped all around him.

Even though he was the one to initiate the contact, he would lay money on her thinking perhaps she's pushed too far, that she's taken from him more than he was really willing to give.

That's not at all how he feels.

And how he is feeling – frankly it surprises him.

He's been fighting _so_ hard against his body's automatic reaction to her being in his life again; despising that he should still desire her so very fiercely. Earlier this very day he was struggling against it, having to hold himself so rigidly away from her it was taking everything that he had, and now both that self-loathing for wanting her, and the urge to battle against it have almost entirely slipped away.

And all because he hears her, feels empathy towards her once again – even if he still doesn't entirely understand.

The empathy is enough however, for him to freely offer her comfort ,while dulling all the desperate edge that any prior touch between them had. The burning desire is there, its always there - but he's able to push it down beneath the surface with an easy, all too familiar control that he hasn't recently had.

It's strange, so strange what he's feeling, there's almost calm inside him. Weird. He's still scared, and scarred, and reticent, and yet he feels more like himself in this moment - with her cradled against his chest, than he has at any time in this past year. Her brutally honest confession has altered his perceptions and his heart beats easier, its rhythm truer with that change.

Still, he doesn't fight it when Kate backs carefully out of his arms; he lets her go freely and merely waits to see what she'll do. His wife kneels on the rug before him and her hand tentatively comes up to rest against his cheek. Firelight illuminates her on one side, the setting sun streams through the windows behind her – she's painted so lovingly that his heart hitches in his chest, captivated. She blows out a cleansing breath and shyly attempts to send him a watery smile, he returns it without thinking.

"I _know_ it must all still sound like excuses," she whispers. "And I know that I can't really claim to understand how very deeply I have hurt you, Rick. Or how much the way that I behaved just piled onto the hell you were in. I would give _anything_ to go back . . . "

She pauses; closing her eyes closing around fresh tears. The dampness clings to her lush eyelashes, beading there un-falling. When she finds her voice once more, all her fierce determination, _all_ her implacable will infuses what she says to him,

"I've made so many mistakes that _you've_ been the one to pay most for, Castle. And so many times you've given me another chance. When you filed for divorce and I saw those papers, Rick - when I held them in my hands it was like I was waking up. I _was _working to get through the wall, back to you – but to my shame I only knew in _that_ moment that I was taking it for granted that you'd be waiting. And I have no excuses for that,. I just wish I could convince you that, _nothing_ could trigger who I am now into acting that way ever again. Forgive me – please, for taking so long to appreciate all that I still had to lose."

Castle swallows heavily. Does he wish that? Does he? Can he see any way to forgive her for her total abandonment of him, and work to put this behind them? Is it any sort of realistic possibility that they could try again?

He looks down at her, eyes scrunched closed, sorrow furrowing her brow. Every part of her posture is tense and repentant and he honestly doesn't know. He doesn't know and then it hits him that 'that', in itself – is a pretty big change. One small moment of open communication between them and he's moved from wanting her out of his life and leaving in him in peace to - 'I don't know'.

_Wow._

Oh that scares him. It really does.

God knows he's barely survived this last year in her absence; every day a hard fight just to hang onto his sanity. Picking up each shard of his life and fitting the sharp, broken, brittle pieces back together has been agonizing. And all he's really accomplished is a semblance of a whole. What she's asking . . .

What if he takes that risk and she's wrong about how she's changed? If something happened, if she left him again - it would undo everything.

He knows he doesn't survive it if he let's her back in - only to lose her _yet _again.

"Kate, look at me," he asks softly, his hand coming up to cover hers where it rests against the plane of his cheek. Her slight fingers are cool, and beneath the engulfing warmness of his they shake slightly. "Your grief broke you, I _can_ understand that," he says gently. "There is no worse grief in life, Kate, than losing what we did."

Her eyes flutter open, the hazel irises shrunken to tiny rims around a deep ocean of black distress. She looks up at him, clearly trying to search for positive affirmation somewhere in his face.

"But can you find it in yourself to forgive me for destroying the rest of our lives?" she whispers shakily. "I know I have no _right_ to ask it of you, Castle. But I've also no _choice_ but to beg it of you anyway."

The writer sighs.

"Are you asking me to forgive you, Kate, or are you asking me to give our marriage another chance?"

His voice is even and calm - though in truth he feels neither, and though he's sure of her answer - for reasons he can't fathom apparently he still wants to hear her actually say it.

Kate doesn't break eye contact at all.

"Both." She responds so quietly it's almost not a word at all, more half plea – half prayer. She offers it up with such longing in her eyes, such love - that it's almost enough to shred his remaining reserve right there.

The writer hesitates to answer though, knows that it's only fair to be plain. "I have no doubt of my ability to forgive you, Kate. Just feeling like I understand better what happened has diminished the pain."

Kate bites her lip, teeth digging into the plump flesh so hard it blanches beneath the strain.

"But . . ." she whispers.

Castle shakes his head.

"No, but."

"I don't understand."

He pulls her hand from his cheek and tangles their fingers together. An image flashes through his mind, how often he would do that as she lay beneath him and they moved in sync together. He has to shake his head slightly to clear it, looks at her only to find her staring at their intertwined digits and he wonders if what she sees is the same.

"I don't have an answer to the second part of your question," he says, his voice careful, low.

Her eyes dart straight to his, a little wild and a whole lot afraid, but he opens his face with raw honesty and then watches as understanding blooms first in her pupils, spilling then across the curves of her face. Her voice trembles with it and there is the barest blush of joy,

"So you're not saying, "No' then?"

The hope in her voice is really overwhelming, roughens his voice,

"I'm not."

* * *

"So what does the physiotherapist say?"

Kate watches as Castle moves with ease about the kitchen, the phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear as he checks in on his mother, via his daughter. The house here is always kept stocked with essentials and though they threw out together the perishables that Martha must have bought, there is enough to cobble them together a decent meal or two.

She'd figured he'd want to leave after right their earlier inspection – maybe that had been his original plan, but since they talked he seems determined to remain. And if he stays, she stays, that's the way she wants it, they've made a sort of start back, nothing more, but him acknowledging that he doesn't have answer to the question of their marriage seems big enough for now.

Leaving him to his conversation she pushes to her feet and wanders through the living room to the French windows that will lead her outside. Stepping out into the twilight she crosses the lawn without stopping for shoes, the plush grass soft as it always is against the soles of her feet. When Kate can see the ocean more clearly, she stops and lets the coming night envelop her, shifting her gaze skywards after a moment she searches for the early stars.

This is a small, but a real change.

There is strange sensation stirring in her and she wants to analyze it because the panic that's been rising inexorably, the unraveling that the approaching date threatened to bring – its still there, but now she's discovering defenses. She's infused with a new strength to stand against the tornado of emotions and manage to keep her life firmly planted in the ground.

Castle has done that.

When he listened to her, when she was finally able to let all that struggle out, spit it up and offer it to him – inadequate though it is, to witness the pain lessening in his eyes and see understanding shimmer there instead, such a gift.

No guarantee. No commitment, but no 'No' either.

And his smile, his beautiful, tentative but real smile - for her, pulled from him unconsciously as he mirrored hers.

Kate stares at the heavens and pictures their son there. She imagines that he watches over them, pulls for them, and before she knows what's she's doing she's whispering to him on the ocean breeze,

"I love your father, Jack. I love him so very desperately. So help me baby, help me stay strong now when your leaving threatens to break me, make me run towards him instead of away."


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter Seventeen: **Like rain in the desert of your heart.

* * *

"The physio said Grams is doing really well, Dad. Stop worrying."

Castle sighs, "Are you doing okay though?" he inquiries quietly. "I'm sorry I kind of ran out on you and left you in charge hunnie, but when I found out Kate was coming up here to go over the case I just . . ."

He can hear Alexis smiling down the phone line.

"You felt you needed to go with her. It's fine, Dad. Grams is still sleeping a lot but she looks good – really. The facial paralysis is startlingly better, and she's pretty bright actually when she's awake. The physio today was for her left hand, and there's a little bit of movement on that side now, which I'm told is insanely ahead of expectations. Dr. Browne was so happy; he said she's amazing him and that he thinks she'll be able to transfer to a private rehab facility soon, most likely within a week."

His daughter's voice isn't showing any strain, and she sounds so happy and relieved that it buoys him. He's been fighting against a wall of guilty feelings for wanting to remain here in the Hamptons a little; the good news is a balm to him.

"Wow. Alexis that's _great_." He sighs into the phone. "Is she communicating at all?"

There's a slight pause.

"Not in words no," Alexis responds. "But her expressions have gotten clearer since she's gained a bit more control of her face back. It's still so early, Dad. Honestly I think we just have to know this is going to take time, and be comforted that she at least understands us. I mean she's nodding and oh she's rolling her eyes now – remember how much she denied it when you told her she stole that from Kate?"

_Oh he remembers._

He can picture it, oh so clearly, and his chest tightens for a moment with the memories. After he and Kate got married his mother had suddenly 'adopted' that trait from his wife and then overused it with a theatrical vengeance. Secretly he'd kind of loved it of course. He'd loved how closely bonded it had seemed to make them.

"Dad? Dad are you still there?"

Realizing he hasn't spoken in too long the writer pulls his thoughts firmly back to his conversation.

"Yeah, yeah I was just thinking," he admits wistfully, and 90 miles away his daughter picks up on the tone in his voice instantly.

"How are things between you and Kate?" she asks gently. "I know it's been difficult to be around her and I'm sure some part of you is mad at me for involving her-"

"I'm not mad," he interrupts quickly, cutting his daughter off.

Alexis sounds surprised,

"You're not? You were." She retorts.

He blows out a slightly frustrated breath.

"Okay, I was - I didn't want to see her, I admit that. But things are a little different now, Alexis. Better."

"Better? Better how?"

Worry has crept into his daughter's voice and suddenly Castle isn't sure how much he wants to tell her. Alexis and Kate have such a checkered history. He'd been so surprised when Alexis wanted to involve his wife in their affairs again, but had chalked it up to too much trauma happening and Alexis needing support she'd feared in that moment he couldn't give her.

'Dad?" she prompts. "Things are different and better how?"

"Not so awkward," he hedges. "We're talking. Kate's . . . Well she's opened up and explained some things and its like weights have been lifted off me. I feel like I understand what happened to her after Jack died. What happened to us - and it helps pumpkin."

"Oh, okay." His daughter replies, but it doesn't sound like she's okay with it, it sounds more like she's scared for him. He gets it, he does. Alexis has been all that's held him together, all that he's lived for since her brother died. She's had to hold their family unit together basically all alone, but he doesn't want to have to justify this. Justify listening to Kate. It's not like he's made any decisions and frankly Alexis is a grown woman, and his marriage really is none of her business.

_Is he defending Kate here?_

He feels prickly, defensive and overwhelmed, but then before he can formulate something that doesn't sound like he's just rolled over and forgiven everything, or like he's making excuses, Alexis surprises him.

"You know what Dad, I'm glad. I'm glad things are better between you and honestly whatever happens all I want is what's best for you. And you still love her; I know you do, so if you can get past what happened, what she did. If you can find each other again, find peace, be happy - I want that for you. The last year has sucked and everyday I've watched you wage this war, Dad. Seeing you struggling, seeing you so miserable has been awful, and I blamed Kate for that, I did; even as I tried to stay focused on the fact that she was a mother whose baby died. But it's not me who needs to forgive her, and it's not me that she's in love with. Just be happy Dad, find a way to smile again, and if what it takes for that to happen is Kate _Beckett_ being Kate _Castle_ again then please don't worry about me. She'll never deserve you in my eyes, but she doesn't have to because it's what _you _deserve that concerns me. And you deserve everything."

Castle chokes up. His eyes blur and his throat closes and he's so damn proud of his daughter. Of who she is, and then that thought makes him ache for the fact that he'll never get to feel this way for his son. He'll never know who Jack would have grown up to be.

"I love you," he murmurs roughly. "Alexis, I-"

"It's okay Dad. No need to say it."

_Bless her._

"I'll be back soon," he promises. "I just – honestly you'd never know anything had happened here kiddo. And with the anniversary the day after tomorrow I . . . I don't want to wake up in the loft that day. I don't think I can deal with it," he confesses a little brokenly.

"Then stay there, Dad. I'll explain to Grams that you will be back in a couple of days and we'll go from there. Is Kate staying with you or does she have to get back to the city? I've never seen her take such an amount of time away from work - except when you guys went on a vacation."

_No, neither has he come to think of it, interesting._

"We haven't discussed it," he replies carefully, "I haven't brought up the anniversary at all because until now I didn't believe for a second that she'd stick around to deal with it. Part of me still doesn't."

The words are heavy, torn from him. Alexis hears in the spaces between such starkly present fears. Her mind races and Alexis can't help but recall how she counseled him to file the divorce papers. How she's gently but firmly pushed him to move on. It had seemed like the only path, the only right thing to do to get him living in the world again. Now suddenly there seems to be another way.

"Maybe you should then." She presses. "It's going to affect you; hell it's going to affect all of us. Dad, please don't let this sneak up on either of you. You've been given a new opportunity to face this as a couple now – maybe it can even be a foundation if you let it."

Her father is quiet the other end, all she can hear is his uneven breathing and the cogs she imagines whirring in his mind. When he replies though, there is a slight smile in his voice, the fear is lessened and there's this delicate optimism caressing the single word.

"Maybe."

"I love you, Dad. Call me when you're heading home, okay."

"I will, and thanks Alexis – for everything."

* * *

Kate stands in the doorway to the kitchen; she catches the final part of her husband's conversation.

"_We haven't discussed it. I haven't brought up the anniversary at all because until now I didn't believe for a second that she'd stick around to deal with it. Part of me still doesn't."_

It makes her tremble to hear the fear in his voice, and she longs to erase it. She can only imagine what Alexis is saying, and Castle is standing with his back to her so she can't see his face. She feels herself tighten with anxiety but then as she watches she's pleased to see the tense set of his shoulders lessen.

"_Maybe._"

His response to his daughter is lighter, less burdened; Kate relaxes a little and allows herself to cross over into the room.

She listens as he sends Alexis his love before he hangs up, and when he notices that she's returned to the kitchen his eyes are almost welcoming.

"Where did you go?" he asks her.

Kate glances over her shoulder and nods towards the French doors,

"I stepped outside; I thought it best to give you some privacy while you talked to Alexis."

He nods, "I appreciate it."

"How's Martha?"

He's smiling now and she notices he looks genuinely pleased as he answers,

"Amazing her doctors and she's started physio for her paralyzed side. Alexis says she's got a little movement back in her left hand and her face looks more even again. She's much better than could be expected actually."

Oh Rick, I'm so happy to hear that."

"Yeah, well it takes a lot to keep my mother down."

Silence falls between them and Kate waits expectantly because the look on Castle's face practically screams that he has something more, maybe something important that he wants to say.

Her husband opens his mouth and then closes it again, turning away he suddenly busies himself once more with the meal prep and Kate is filled with an uneasy disappointment as the moment slips away.

* * *

After a quick dinner she helps him clean up in silence, lost for a topic of conversation. Finally when he pours himself another glass of wine and then wanders away towards the living room she decides to just dive in.

"Rick?"

He pauses in the center of the space, turning on another lamp next to the couch now that the sun has set and all the light from outside has finally faded.

"What?"

"Are we staying the night?"

He looks surprised by the question.

"I am," he replies evenly. "You of course are free to return to the city if you choose. But this is your house as well, Kate. So if you want to stay - stay."

He sits and then sort of studiously ignores her.

She screws up her courage and sits next to him.

"I didn't pack anything, but I don't want to leave you," she whispers.

He nods towards the upstairs.

"Everything that was in your closet here is still there," he admits carefully, "Just the same as the loft, Kate. I haven't touched any of it."

She recalls looking for their wedding photo the morning after she came back to him. How she'd found it in her lingerie drawer nestled on top of her things. She didn't actually look in their gigantic walk-in closet, but she can't help the way everything inside her is warmed that he'd still kept everything – waiting.

"How long would -"she begins, but he cuts her off quietly.

"I was going to wait until you'd signed the divorce papers I think. Then I'd have had it all returned to you," he confesses.

_Oh._

He looks at her then, eyes almost black in the lamp-lighted room.

"Don't you have to get back to the Precinct? It's been days, Kate. I'm only noticing because Alexis happened to point it out, but what about your work? Why have you just dropped everything to be here with me?"

She frowns, how can he ask that after their earlier conversation? How can he not know? But he looks like he needs to hear her say this.

"You're my husband - my family. So are Martha and Alexis. I cannot fail my family again, Castle. I can't and I won't. And since you're asking, Gates has already promised me all the time you need."

"I need?"

He sounds surprised.

Kate nods.

"You'll never hear her admit it, but I think the Captain has missed _you _terribly this last year. And she's been very gentle towards me, Rick. Patient in ways that I never would have suspected were in her."

"Oh."

His eyes drop from hers then and he takes a large swallow of his wine, seemingly content to just leave the conversation right there.

But Kate isn't. She knows they've made progress today and she's desperate for more of it already, greedy even.

"So whatever your plans are, however long you intend to be here, Castle - can I stay?" she whispers quietly.

He turns to look at her, his eyes dark and impassive - unreadable.

"It's your house too," he repeats.

She's frustrated. "I know. But _you_ know that's not what I'm asking."

Silent he just stares at her, expression gradually altering and giving him away - he looks wary now.

"Kate, I-"

He gapes at her, struggling.

"I'm not leaving either way," she promises suddenly. "If you're staying, then I'm staying. I'm just asking if you _want_ me here."

His response is silence, it holds long and stretches.

"I don't . . . I can't ask." He admits eventually, and the look in his eyes is so conflicted, so honestly helpless.

It stings, but Kate swallows the hurt - really its nothing. She forces herself to remember that she's pushing him here. They've moved forwards, so she has to let it be enough for today. Scrambling a little off the couch she tries to smile as she runs both hands through her hair as she stands before him. It's early really, barely nine forty-five but she's totally drained from today.

"I'm going to go and look out some sleep clothes then," she tells him. "I'll grab some things from our bathroom and take the guest room. Goodnight, Rick."

She's barely halfway up the stairs when she hears him behind her, his bare feet making almost no sound against the highly polished oak floor. He stops at the base of the staircase just as she turns around.

"Stay."

It's one word, just one word, but he holds her gaze as says it, his face quietly determined. Then before she can answer him, he turns back towards the living room and steps away.

She holds onto the look in his eyes as she climbs the rest of the way to the upper floor, she feels light - like she's walking on air.


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter Eighteen: **Just let me kiss you anywhere it hurts.

* * *

When Kate wakes up, it's later than she normally sleeps these days. The guest room is dull around her, grey light filtering in through the gauzy curtains that cover the expensive oak slatted blinds she'd left open purposely.

As her senses sharpen with wakefulness she hears both the cries of gulls and the steady patter of rain on the house's roof, the plaintive calls blending perfected into what she knows must be a damp and overcast Hampton's morning. Somehow that, and the strangeness of waking in a room she's never used, in a home she's called her own for years, leaches away the sense of lightness she'd felt just the night before and she's left feeling hollowed out and unsettled in the wake of it. She hasn't shared a bed with Castle in a year and yet it seems she's never been more conscious of that than this morning, waking up here.

Sitting up and swinging her legs out of bed, Kate stands and then pads barefooted to the window. Pulling back the curtains, she takes in the sight of the lush lawn at the rear of the property, and beyond it the huge and currently empty expanse of beach. She's spies a lone figure standing by the water's edge, stock still and staring at the horizon, the height and breath of the silhouette tells her instantly that it's her husband.

Castle was never one to be up early.

She thinks he looks pensive and brooding out there all by himself, though of course all she can see his back from here, but it enforces the sense of unease that she's awoken with. It reminds her that this is the very last morning they have before they really are a full revolution around the sun away from who they used to be, and the sight of him so alone out there in the rain is disturbing. It twists something inside her that strengthens her resolve and Kate turns from the window in a hurry now - desperate to dress and to go out there so she can be with him.

* * *

Rick breathes the slightly humid, salty sea air into his lungs greedily. There's something about standing next to the ocean that has always reminded him of eternity. The endless pattern of the waves beating against the sand in a cadence as old as the planet herself, it speaks to him, calms his spirit. It's ever been that way, and he's in dire need of that calming effect this morning.

He did not sleep well last night. Tossing and turning for hours before he'd finally fallen into a fitful sleep, and then dreamed with an eerie almost waking clarity. Nightmares plagued him. He'd emerged from them more than once, gasping into the darkness with the echoes of Kate's screams from the year before still ringing in his ears.

He'd reached out for her each time, (and that's something he'd finally stopped doing some months ago), only to be reminded by the empty expanse next to him that she wasn't sleeping there. And it had actually felt weird - probably because he knew that she was in the house – for him to be in the familiar bed, yet all alone.

He'd almost; almost gone in search of her around 4am - just so that he could get some rest, but his pride just wouldn't let him. In the end he'd settled for simply getting up with the dawn and coming down to the beach instead, hopeful that the ocean could work her usual magic on him, center his being as she eased his fears.

An hour or so later and Castle does feel better - even if he's not very rested, and he's thankful that events have conspired to get him away from New York and bring him out here. The loft would be far too much to deal with right now, as it is the writer can already feel the grief swelling within him; the coming marker of Jackson's passing forcing him right back to the terrible bleakness of that morning once again.

Time - they say, heals all wounds. But Castle can't help but think that though time may dull its sharp teeth; this date in June is just always going to be hell.

Turning his face up towards the light rain that's falling, Castle lets it wash over his face as he breathes it in. It feels soft and almost gentle, like the sky is crying, the wet caress as subtly persistent as his agony.

He's thinking about perhaps taking a long walk in it as he stands there, and then he hears them, quiet footfalls approaching across the damp sand, and Rick doesn't have to open his eyes to know that Kate's found him.

* * *

Her husbands' face is wet from the rain, his hair darkened and plastered to his head just as his t-shirt and sweatpants are plastered to his skin. As Kate approaches him it becomes evident that it's clearly been some time that he's been standing out here. He doesn't move as she approaches, he just keeps his head turned up towards the sky like maybe he's praying, so she comes to a stop a few feet away and silently waits on him.

"How did you sleep?" he asks, breaking the silence suddenly and dropping his head back to its usual position, he turns his ocean colored eyes towards hers.

She wants to tell him that she slept well, and she did, but the bruise-like shadows she can see under his vivid eyes halt the words before they ever make it off her lips.

"You don't look like you slept at all, Castle," she says instead. The words are laced with gentle concern, and she steps closer, her hand coming up to glide softly over his cheekbone before she can over think it. His skin is a little chilled beneath the slide of her fingertips, even though the rain isn't actually cold and the June day is mild despite it.

Her husband stands still until Kate drops her hand away, then he shrugs lightly,

"Just bad dreams," he replies, and it's almost nonchalantly, like he's really trying to dismiss them as nothing lest it should become clear how very much is already weighing on him today.

But it's not as if she can't guess exactly what terrors were hounding him so Kate opts to carry on as if he's just admitted it.

She's reins in the automatic, 'I'm sorry', before it escapes her mouth, and focuses instead on something that might actually help him, help them both, namely the only plan she has which is to keep right on forcing herself to be open with him.

"I haven't dreamt of it recently," she admits, her eyes full of worries as they remain steadily on his. "You'd think I would, wouldn't you? You'd think it would plague me. And what's worse is that each morning when I wake and I've slept without dreaming of it - I feel so guilty."

Castle watches her silently, assessingly for a long moment.

"Did you dream about it in the beginning?" he asks at length, and there's no judgment in his face that she can see, just his natural curiosity.

Kate nods, finding that she's strangely relieved that he's asking.

"Walk with me?" she asks, tilting her head up the beach towards the breakwater. Castle smiles faintly in reply and then falls in step beside her, close but not touching and his hands disappear quickly and with an obvious awkwardness into his pockets.

They cover fifty feet or so of the beach before she answers him.

"At first, and then for a couple of months I dreamt of it every night without fail," she confesses in a small voice whose steadiness successfully masks how devastating that was for her. "I'd wake up screaming, pleading, crying hysterically, and then I'd switch off. Go numb for the rest of the day."

She looks at him sideways under her eyelashes, "And what about you, Rick?"

Beside her he tenses, his previously even paces faltering slightly. Taking a deep breath he returns her sideways glance and gives just the smallest shake of his head. "Actually I'd always dream I was searching for you, "he says. "I wouldn't dream about what had actually happened - that Jack had died. I'd just dream you were gone, and then I'd wake up looking for you and it would hit me it was true. I'd go up to the nursery and it would be empty, everywhere was empty. These dreams of you screaming for him are new."

They walk on in silence for the next few minutes, Kate trying digest that information and gather herself and Castle holding in so many things he wants to ask her that he hasn't been able to this last year.

"You know," he says at length. "Once I knew you were seeing Dr. Burke again, Kate, those dreams got less frequent. Knowing that you were seeing him, it made things better."

Her eyes snap to his.

"It did? How did you even know?" she asks.

"Lanie," he confesses gently. "Lanie's been begging me from the beginning to just give you time, Kate. The boys have too. Right up until what would have been Jackson's first birthday even."

Kate stops dead in her tracks, but Castle continues a few paces ahead before he almost reluctantly turns back to face her.

His wife's eyes are huge in her suddenly pale face; clearly the fact that her friends have been continually championing her to him is news. "Up until Jack's birthday . . ." she repeats.

The writer nods slightly, "I haven't actually spoken to any of them since," he admits, and there's almost shame in his face as he says it, but anger and hostility flaring in his eyes as well. Obviously he's become estranged from their friends and it bothers him, and he's unsure of where to place the blame for this.

Kate frowns. "That was four months ago," she whispers to him.

Castle nods again. "Yep, the final time that I came by the precinct in some last ditch attempt to get you to speak to me," he says somewhat bitterly. "For all the good that it did me."

If he says more at this point she stops hearing it, because oh God, how she remembers that day.

She'd been greeted by awkwardness and empathy everywhere she went. All her colleagues had seemed so very surprised to see her working. Her partners had been hyper vigilant and sweetly over protective, and Gates had simply forced her to stay away from any fresh cases, benching her with paperwork the entire day.

She'd been lost, overwhelmed, and highly conscious of the fact that the same day the prior year had been the happiest of her existence. Desperate, she'd needed to work like she'd never needed to work before. She'd known she could only get through by filling her mind with anything else until the day was over. And when Castle had shown up . . . God, even now it's almost too much for her to recall it.

He'd staggered out of the elevator, unshaven and red-eyed, completely disheveled mid-afternoon. He'd spied her and called for her, and she'd dared one look- one single look at his beautiful, desperately unhappy face and she'd fled. She'd gotten up from her desk, and run. From him, from the precinct – she doesn't even remember exactly how she ended up at her apartment, but she can still recall the cold, solid weight of her gun in her hand.

So very close she came that day. Four months of tiny progress with Dr, Burke had entirely washed away beneath the certain knowledge that she would never be able to be happy again.

And then it had come to her - that one look that she'd stolen at his face, and the memory of his agony had stilled her finger on the trigger. It had made her get up and put the gun safely away.

She'd called Dr. Burke and she'd gone to see him as an emergency and somehow she's managed slow but steady steps forward from there.

The memories fade from her mind and Castle comes back into view. He's watching her silently. Kate crosses the few steps between them, she stares up into his watchful face and wants nothing more than to confess to it all. But she's terrified that he'll be more weighed down by how close she came to suicide - than lifted by seeing that he was _all_ that stayed her hand on that day. The time will come, it will come and one day she'll explain every part of it to him, but this will have to be enough for now,

"You were with me that day," she tells him, "even though I ran from you, Castle. You were there. And I know how hard that must sound to believe. But seeing you then - that's when I started back, I think. It was a turning point for me, and I'm so grateful."

Clear eyed, the cop holds out her hand to him, waiting.

The writer hesitates, but only fractionally. Slowly he pulls his right hand from his pocket and then he gently accepts the gesture that she's offering.

Kate wraps her slender fingers around his broad, stronger ones and feels another part of herself come home. She tugs him forward then, and together they continue to silently walk the beach.


End file.
